If you ask me,” says the driver, “it all spells a dose of trouble.” “It’s as if a hundred summers have come at once to the town, when a mile along the coast the rain’s hopping up off the ground and there’s a wind that would freeze the tits off a hen. So hot that the crows are flying with their tongues hanging out of their heads. It’s the hottest April in living and dead memory. You’ll get no talk from them today: they are struck dumb by the weather, for it hasn’t rained for days and days and days. Up and down the high street, from Adair’s Pharmacy to Farr’s Outfitters, from the offices of Gibbons & McGrath Solicitors to the Post Office and General Store, all is quiet.Ī couple of old ones are sitting by the painted pump in the middle of the square. Why would they when all the roads that lead to Mulderrig are downhill so that leaving is uphill all the way?Īt this time of the day the few shops are shuttered and closed, and the signs swing with an after-hours lilt and pitch, and the sun-warmed shop front letters bloom and fade. People are born to live and stay and die here. Here the trees are as old as the mountains and a clear river runs into the sea. Here the colors are a little bit brighter and the sky is a little bit wider. Twenty-six years makes no odds.įor Mulderrig is a place like no other. Mulderrig doesn’t change, fast or slowly. If Mahony could remember the place, which he can’t of course, he’d not notice many changes since he’s been gone. Today Mulderrig is just a benign little speck of a place, uncoiled and sprawling, stretched out in the sun. Mahony shoulders his rucksack, steps off the bus, and stands in the dead center of the village of Mulderrig. Chatty ghosts rise from their graves with secrets to tell, and local preacher Father Quinn will do anything to get rid of the slippery young man who is threatening the moral purity of his parish.Ī spectacular new addition to the grand Irish storytelling tradition, Himself “is a darkly comic tale of murder, intrigue, haunting and illegitimacy…wickedly funny” ( Daily Express).

Neither he nor Mulderrig can possibly prepare for what’s in store…įrom the moment he arrives, Mahony’s presence completely changes the village. Determined to find out what really happened, Mahony embarks on a pilgrimage back to his hometown, the rural village of Mulderrig. That is, until one night in 1976 while drinking a pint at a Dublin pub, he receives an anonymous note implying that she may have been forced to give him up. Having been abandoned at an orphanage as a baby, Mahony assumed all his life that his mother wanted nothing to do with him. A charming ne’er-do-well returns to his haunted Irish hometown to uncover the truth about his mother in this “supernaturally skilled debut” ( Vanity Fair) and turns the town-and his life-upside down.

Himself kidd