Exile

More about the book

Deoraiocht -- Exile -- ranks as one of the most colorful and audacious novels in Irish literature and is considered Ireland's first modernist work of fiction. Much like Orwell's Down and Out in London and Paris, Exile moves between London and Galway, depicting the joys and, mostly, the sorrows and tribulations of the outcasts of an uncaring society. Micheal O Maolain is a circus freak in a London sideshow which travels to Ireland. There he sees his former lover and gets the crowd to wreck the circus. Exile is a heady mixture of innocence and corruption. O Conaire's rattling and quixotic narrative, in all its sweep, detail, humor and horror is finally captured in this sensitive and long-overdue translation.