Set on Ireland’s Atlantic coast, Before the House Burns is a tender, implosive first novel by an award-winning short story writer and poet. It concerns the lives of its three young narrators, children of a bereaved father and witnesses to a shared grief.

This nuanced and heart-breaking account of one family’s struggle – for work, shelter and happiness – enters the imagination through this braided, pitch-perfect tale of a family whose lives fracture around two tragic events. It is a story of what happens when self-sustenance turns to isolation, a story about the hard scrabble to find a home.

Despite their sufferings, Before the House Burns is not yet another tale of an unhappy Irish childhood. What makes this novel unique is not only the calibre of the writing, but also its depiction of the love that binds the family together as they suffer blow after blow to their lives.

‘Electric, real, utterly modern: this is a voice to welcome and to watch.’ – Anne Enright.

‘Award-winning short story writer and poet Mary O’Donoghue (right) doesn’t pull any punches with her debut novel.. O’ Donoghue is a gifted writer, her voice disquieting and evocative. Her themes are modern and ambitious and the characters delicately developed. On reading Before The House Burns Anne Enright called Mary O’Donohue “a voice to welcome and watch”, and indeed it is.’ – The Independent

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mary O’Donoghue was born in 1975 and grew up in Co. Clare. Her short stories have been published in Agni, Salamander, The Dublin Review, Literary Imagination and elsewhere. Her awards for fiction include Hennessy/Sunday Tribune, New Irish Writer and a writer’s bursary from Massachusetts Cultural Council. She is the author of poetry collections Tulle (Salmon Poetry, 2001) and Among These Winters (Dedalus Press, 2007). She teaches in the Arts and Humanities division at Babson College, Massachusetts, and lives in Boston.