First novel for Tubber writer

TUBBER native, Mary O’Donoghue, has released her first novel to critical acclaim.Before the House Burns, set on Ireland’s Atlantic coast, concerns the lives of its three young narrators, children of a bereaved father and witnesses to a shared grief.
Mary O’Donoghue is an award-winning short story writer and poet. She was born in 1975 and grew up in Tubber. 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.
Her first novel, Before the House burns, has been published by The Lilliput Press and is described by Booker prize-winning author Anne Enright as “Electric, real and utterly modern: this is a voice to welcome and to watch.”
The publisher’s description of the book refers to it as “a nuanced and heart-breaking account of one family’s struggle – for work, shelter and happiness… a story of what happens when self-sustenance turns to isolation, a story about the hard scrabble to find a home. 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.”