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.