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The Waking Of Willie Ryan
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By: John Broderick
Publisher: The Lilliput Press Ltd
Published: May 2026
Pages: 264
Categories: Fiction, Literature
Language: English
Available as: Paperback, Audio
On sale at:
ISBN-13: 9781807620042

Willie Ryan returns to his home town in ‘the great central plain of Ireland’, having escaped from the insane asylum where he was committed, and unvisited, by his devout Catholic family for twenty-five years. The given pretext for his commitment was an attack on his sister-in-law, Mary Ryan, wife of his brother Michael. The true reason: an affair with a hedonistic young man who introduced him to art, literature and music. In this exposee; of the ‘petty bourgeois snobbishness, hypocrisies and pretensions of the ‘little grocer’s republic’ of 1950s Ireland, nothing evil happens as long as it is not seen. Through Willie’s piercing vision, we see the truth of his brother Michael’s grief and remorse, his nephew Chris’s fear of freedom, and the perceptiveness of asylum nurse Halloran. As Willie prepares for death, he agrees to a private family mass, setting the stage for a confrontation with father Mannix, one of those complicit in putting him away. Long overlooked but now recognised as a quietly radical masterpiece, The Waking of Willie Ryan reveals John Broderick as one of the most incisive chroniclers of mid‑century Ireland. Set in a midlands town where beauty and brutality uneasily coexist, the novel follows the return of Willie Ryan – once scapegoated for his relationships with men, institutionalised, and written out of local memory – who comes home to die and, in doing so, unsettles the pieties that once destroyed him. Broderick’s portrait of Willie is unforgettably tender: a gay man whose dignity, vulnerability and refusal ‘to serve’ expose the hypocrisies of a society built on fear. Through crystalline prose and an unsparing eye, Broderick maps the forces – clerical authority, bourgeois respectability, inherited shame – that shaped Irish life in the 1960s. A pioneering exploration of queer Irish experience and a devastating critique of provincial cruelty, The Waking of Willie Ryan stands alongside the great modern Irish novels for its moral clarity, elegance, and emotional force.

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