McNally Editions
The Pilgrimage
Couldn't load pickup availability
Title: The Pilgrimage
Author: John Broderick
Fiction: 1699612
ISBN: 9781946022950
Publisher: McNally Editions
Published: 2025
Binding: Paperback
Language: English
Number of Pages: 224
Section: Fiction | World Literature | Ireland - 20th Century
Condition Note: New from the publisher
Publisher Description:
An erotic nightmare of Catholic longing, guilt, and desire and a banned classic of modern Irish literature.
Wealthy and devout, Michael and Julia Glynn are the envy of their neighbors and the model Irish Catholic couple, bearing Michael's increasingly painful and crippling arthritis with stoicism. In hope of a miracle, their priest suggests a family pilgrimage to Lourdes. Yet these pious holiday plans are thrown into disarray when anonymous, obscene letters begin to arrive, full of terrible accusations.
Banned in Ireland on its first publication in 1961, Broderick's debut arrived "like an incendiary device" (Sunday Independent). The Pilgrimage anticipated the deep shifts that would soon turn the country's theocratic society upside down. It is a darkly comic, blasphemous, and sexually charged chamber drama laying bare the hypocrisies of a small Irish town "as watchful as the jungle," and teetering on the brink of catastrophe. In the words of Colm Tóibín, in his foreword to this edition, The Pilgrimage "cleared a space in the jungle so that its wildness could be more easily seen."
