The Bogman

Orphaned as a child, Cahal Kinsella returns from an industrial school in Letterfrack to the small farming village of Caherlo in West Galway, to live under the rule of his tyrannical grandfather. Cahal must learn to assert his individuality if he is to have any hope of freedom from his misery. With humour and humanity, Walter Macken paints a haunting, memorable portrait of the hard life of subsistence farming, of loveless arranged marriages, and rebellion against suffocating social mores. Written in 1952, this masterpiece is brought back to life in New Island's Modern Irish Classics series.

Walter Macken was born in Galway in 1915. A prolific writer, Macken wrote numerous short stories, articles, plays and children's books, in addition to his ten novels. Much of his early life was bound up with the theatre. A talented actor and playwright, he was involved in the production of some seventy-seven plays between 1939 and 1947 alone, before becoming Assistant Manager and Artistic Advisor with the Abbey Theatre in the 1960s. Following his onstage success, Macken was offered an enormous sum of money to star in a US-based film production. He refused, saying he had to 'go home to finish a novel'. That novel became The Bogman (1952), and six further novels would follow. He died in 1967 in his native Galway at the age of just fifty-one.