A Wreath upon the Dead

Briege Duffaud

Myth begins to unravel when Maureen Murphy, a romantic novelist who lives in a château in France, decides to base her next book on the tale of Irish folk hero, Cormac O'Flaherty. Cormac was a jockey who, in the years before the great famine of the 1840s, married his landlord's daughter, Marianne McLeod. Maureen's interest is heightened because Cormac and Marianne lived in the Claghan district of South Armagh where she herself was brought up. Her oldest friend, Kathleen O'Flaherty, is a direct descendant of the Cormac of the story.

Briege Duffaud's account of the interweaving of simple myth and complex truth in the lives of the modern O'Flahertys and McLeods makes an absolutely compelling story. Women's voices predominate in this witty, rueful and intensely readable novel which explores the national ambiguities, the facts and the fictions, of irish life during the last sixty years. It is as eloquent about the London of the Swinging Sixties as it is about troubled Ulster.

Poolpeg Press 1993

Translated into: French

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