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Lisa McInerney
Represented By: Ivan Mulcahy
Lisa McInerney is the author of three novels: The Glorious Heresies, The Blood Miracles and The Rules of Revelation.
She has won the Women’s Prize for Fiction, the Desmond Elliott Prize, the RSL Encore Award and the Premio Edoardo Kihlgren for European literature, and has been nominated for the International Dublin Literary Award, the Premio Strega Europeo, the Sunday Times Short Story Award, and twice for the Dylan Thomas Award.
Her work has featured in Winter Papers, Granta, The Guardian, Le Monde, Internazionale, Vogue CS, The Irish Times, BBC Radio 4 and numerous anthologies. She is published in 12 languages.
She teaches Creative Writing at the University of Galway, and, in 2022, was appointed editor of The Stinging Fly.
Represented By: Ivan Mulcahy
Lisa McInerney is the author of three novels: The Glorious Heresies, The Blood Miracles and The Rules of Revelation.
She has won the Women’s Prize for Fiction, the Desmond Elliott Prize, the RSL Encore Award and the Premio Edoardo Kihlgren for European literature, and has been nominated for the International Dublin Literary Award, the Premio Strega Europeo, the Sunday Times Short Story Award, and twice for the Dylan Thomas Award.
Her work has featured in Winter Papers, Granta, The Guardian, Le Monde, Internazionale, Vogue CS, The Irish Times, BBC Radio 4 and numerous anthologies. She is published in 12 languages.
She teaches Creative Writing at the University of Galway, and, in 2022, was appointed editor of The Stinging Fly.
Published Works
Author: Lisa McInerney
Genres: Literary Fiction
Winner of the 2018 Encore Award for Best Second Novel
Like all twenty-year-olds, Ryan Cusack is trying to get his head around who he is.
This is not a good time for his boss to exploit his dual heritage by opening a new black market route from Italy to Ireland. It is certainly not a good time for his adored girlfriend to decide he’s irreparably corrupted. And he really wishes he hadn’t accidentally caught the eye of an ornery grandmother who fancies herself his saviour.
There may be a way clear of the chaos in the business proposals of music promoter Colm and in the attention of the charming, impulsive Natalie. But now that his boss’s ambitions have rattled the city, Ryan is about to find out what he’s made of, and it might be that chaos is in his blood.
“The second novel from the author of the hugely successful debut The Glorious Heresies . . . McInerney's many fans will be pleased to hear her follow up revolves around the further misadventures of Ryan in Cork city.”
- The Bookseller“The narration is brisk and slick, the dialogue fizzing with acerbic wisecracking.”
- Literary Review“Lisa Mcinerney is a writer busily combining the traditions of hardcore Irish crime writing with the kind of fast-talking foul-mouthed wit and gentle good humour that readers will recall from the work of Roddy Doyle, and producing popular state-of-the-nation novels as a consequence.”
- Times Literary Supplement“Trainspotting meets Goodfellas . . . McInerney writes with delicious irreverence and her fiction in this book has a fast, filmic quality.”
- Evening Standard“Lively, entertaining, salty and funny.”
- The Irish Examiner“The plot's a slippery snake of dodgy deals and deadly double crosses, with a series of handbrake turns at the end. It's standard gangster stuff, spiked into originality by the chemical kick of McInerney's prose.”
- The Spectator“If you like Trainspotting, Peaky Blinders, Guy Ritchie and Quentin Tarantino then this is a rackety, kinetic, hold-your-attention-at-gunpoint book.”
- The Times“McInerney writes with enviable verve, swagger and humour.”
- Mail on Sunday
Author: Lisa McInerney
Genres: Literary fiction
REUNIONS. RECRIMINATIONS. RECKONINGS.
Ireland. Great nationalists, bad mothers and a whole lot of secrets. Ryan Cusack is ready to deliver its soundtrack.
Former sex-worker Georgie wants the truth about Ryan’s past out there but the journalist has her own agenda.
Mel returns from Brexit Britain, ill-equipped to deal with the resurgence of a family scandal.
Karine has always been sure of herself, till a terrible secret tugs the rug from under her.
Maureen has got wind that things are changing, and if anyone’s telling the story she wants to make sure it’s her.
A riotous blast of sex, scandal, obsession, love, feminism, gender, music, class and transgression from an author with tremendous, singular talent.
“Not only a glorious, bold, funny state-of-the-nation novel, but a beautiful and painful love story too.”
- Sally Rooney“Everything about this book glows.”
- Roddy Doyle“featured in 21 Books for 2021”
- The Irish Examiner“featured in Books To Look Out For In 2021”
- The Irish Times“Moves from the tragic to the hilarious with a dazzling deftness.”
- Louise O’Neill“Brilliantly inventive”
- Colin Barrett“A raw, intense novel, full of tenderness.”
- Mary Costello“Stylish and relentlessly original”
- Nicole Flatterly“It's her best work to date, which is really something”
- Kevin Barry“The Rules of Revelation: Lisa McInerney closes ‘unholy trilogy’ with a rebel yell.”
- The Irish Independent“One of the great achievements of modern Irish fiction”
- Sunday Times“Sharp and satisfying . . . McInerney's world is a compelling sleazy demi-monde of drug dealers, sex workers and property developers, and she has a pleasing disdain for minimalism: here you'll find big characters and lots of them”
- The Guardian
Author: Lisa McInerney
Genres: Literary Fiction
‘He was definitely dead, whoever he was.
He wore a once-black jumper and a pair of shiny tracksuit bottoms. The back of his head was cracked and his hair matted, but it had been foxy before that. A tall man, a skinny rake, another string of piss, now departed. She hadn’t gotten a look at his face before she flaked him with the Holy Stone and she couldn’t bring herself to turn him over.’
One messy murder affects the lives of five misfits who exist on the fringes of Ireland’s post-crash society. Ryan is a fifteen-year-old drug dealer desperate not to turn out like his alcoholic father Tony, whose obsession with his unhinged next-door neighbour threatens to ruin him and his family. Georgie is a prostitute whose willingness to feign a religious conversion has dangerous repercussions, while Maureen, the accidental murderer, has returned to Cork after forty years in exile to discover that Jimmy, the son she was forced to give up years before, has grown into the most fearsome gangster in the city. In seeking atonement for the murder and a multitude of other perceived sins, Maureen threatens to destroy everything her son has worked so hard for, while her actions risk bringing the intertwined lives of the Irish underworld into the spotlight . . .
Biting, moving and darkly funny, The Glorious Heresies explores salvation, shame and the legacy of Ireland’s twentieth-century attitudes to sex and family.
The Glorious Heresies, is being republished amongst ten titles in John Murray’s new Classics launch list, available 14th August 2025.