A crooked field - Colm O'Gaora

An outcast in his own land, forced to sell his beloved fields to pay for his wife's funeral and the rearing of his young daughter, Conor Kelly is increasingly bitter at the life he has been pushed into. As his daughter, Helen, grows up, her attempts to move out of her father's dark shadow begin to drive them apart.

A Crooked Field is a beautiful and haunting novel about the search for one's soul amidst the struggle between blind faith and reason. In O'Gaora's resonant prose the exiled communities and darkened streets of London are as vividly imagined as the narrow lives and fluid landscapes of Ireland.

'There's a grace and understated simplicity to his prose . . . reminiscent of John McGahern and William Trevor' Christina Patterson, Observer

'If I read another debut novel that comes close to the power and grace of A Crooked Field I will be surprised, and while I could lap up a novel every week from this writer, when it's quality like this, the quantity becomes an irrelevance' Irish Post

'A novel distinguished by considerable imaginative power' Irish Independent