GUILT RULES ALL!

Some of you may have noticed my lack of posting for a wee while. It's hasn't been because I've disappeared off the planet, more a twist and turn of life, so please forgive me.

However, today I'm delighted to share this Irish Crime Fiction gem with you. Edited by Elizabeth Mannion and Brian Cliff 'GUILT RULES ALL 'explores and celebrates Irish Crime Fiction. I feel honoured to be one of the writers featured in this work which conveys the breadth of the genre.

Within a piece by Rosemary Erickson Johnson on the Kate Pearson series, she says, "Phillips's series offers insight into contemporary Irish society, with a particular reference to women's lives and feminist issues, and helps us to define the parameters of domestic noir in the face of sometimes-competing demands of series fiction." 

Well, that will do me!

Hope you are all surviving these rather testing times!

Irish Crime Files!!

IRISH CRIME FICTION, by Brian Cliff which was recently published by Palgrave MacMillan, will have it's official launch in The Gutter Bookshop on the 25th July. It is not only a must for the diary, but the book is a must for writers and readers alike. This book represents the first in-depth study of Irish Crime Fiction and its progression from wider Irish literature into a unique genre of its own, and Brian Cliff offers readers the chance to explore Irish crime writing from a fresh perspective, as well as posing important considerations for further study.

I'm delighted that my work is included in this study. Here is a short quote - "Phillips's work reaches towards Irish family Gothic material, with a profound sense of tangled and interwoven lives.." and that's a lovely overview to read at any time.

The book examines the recent expansion of Ireland's literary tradition to include home-grown crime fiction, and it surveys the wave of books that use genre structures to explore specifically Irish issues such as the Troubles and the rise and fall of the Celtic Tiger, as well as Irish experiences of human trafficking, the supernatural, abortion, and civic corruption. These novels are as likely to address the national regulation of sexuality through institutions like the Magdalen Laundries as they are to follow serial killers through the American South or to trace international corporate conspiracies.

This study includes chapters on Northern Irish crime fiction, novels set in the Republic, women protagonists, and transnational themes, and discusses Irish authors’ adaptations of a well-loved genre and their effect on assumptions about the nature of Irish literature. It is a book for readers of crime fiction and Irish literature alike, illuminating the fertile intersections of the two. Personally, I can't wait to get my hands on a copy!!