{"product_id":"9781843519898-waking-of-willie-ryan","title":"The Waking Of Willie Ryan","description":"\u003cmeta content=\"text\/html; charset=utf-8\" http-equiv=\"Content-Type\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cp\u003eWillie Ryan returns to his home town having escaped from the asylum where he was committed 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. The true reason: an affair with a hedonistic young man who introduced him to art, literature and music.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003eLong overlooked but now recognised as a quietly radical masterpiece, \u003cem\u003eThe Waking of Willie Ryan\u003c\/em\u003e 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBroderick’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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eA pioneering exploration of queer Irish experience and a devastating critique of provincial cruelty, \u003cem\u003eThe Waking of Willie Ryan\u003c\/em\u003e stands alongside the great modern Irish novels for its moral clarity, elegance, and emotional force.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Rarewaves","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57891683795318,"sku":"9781843519898","price":11.14,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0092\/7504\/8033\/files\/orig_41372335.jpg?v=1780404004","url":"https:\/\/www.rarewaves.com\/products\/9781843519898-waking-of-willie-ryan","provider":"Rarewaves.com","version":"1.0","type":"link"}