Something in the HeadSomething in the Head: The Life & Work of John Broderickby Madeline Kingston \n \nThis is the first full biography of Athlone born writer John Broderick (1924 89), whose powerful Balzacian novels of life in the Irish midlands depict sexuality and Catholicism in a series of pungent tableaux and portraits drawn from vivid but entrapped lives. \n \nSon of a prosperous baker, the solitude of his childhood (compounded by boarding school), an enveloping

From three days’ of age I was inducted onto the Christian sacramental road

As Thomas Mann said of The Magic Mountain

has just buried his mother

paratroopers

The writer

explores his own poetics

identity and purpose

who was raised at Maidenhall in County Kilkenny by the historian and essayist Hubert Butler and his wife Peggy

philosophy and literature – from the sacred writings of Christian mystics to coffin texts of the Egyptians and cradle texts of the Navajo Indians – Moriarty transforms humanity’s Pequod voyage of self-destruction into an Ishmaelite quest for Divine Ground

The result is candid

Gerard Dillon

“Sweet mutiny/And power” are Peggy O’Brien’s reward