Mother Of Pearl

Mother of Pearl is the first novel from acclaimed Irish short story writer, Mary Morrissy

Mary Morrissy has published three novels – Mother of Pearl, The Pretender and The Rising of Bella Casey – and a collection of short stories, A Lazy Eye (1993). She has won a Hennessy Award and a Lannan Literary Foundation Award and currently teaches at University College Cork.

MOTHER OF PEARL, the first novel by an acclaimed Irish short-story writer, explores the disturbing territory of the divided self. Through the story of the kidnapping of a baby, the notion of personal history as received fiction is examined. The novel asks: what makes a family? Is it mere kinship through blood, or something more profound and intricate? What keeps it together? What tears it apart? The action of the novel is seen through the eyes of a baby's mother, the kidnapper and the child itself. Dramatic, blackly funny and tragically topical, MOTHER OF PEARL is a remarkable achievement.

The Pretender

Berlin 1920. A young woman throws herself from a bridge into the Landwehr Canal, intent on suicide. But she is saved. She refuses to give any clue to her identity. She is literally a nobody. After two years of silence, she claims to be Anastasia, the fourth daughter of the Tsar of Russia. For over sixty years she lives with the firm conviction that she is, indeed, a grand duchess. It is only after her death in 1984 that DNA tests establish that the woman could not have been a Romanov. Who, then, was this mysterious woman, who lived a lie and convinced so many others of her fictional identity? And what of her own identity that she drowned that winter's night in Berlin? 
 
In The Pretender, Mary Morrissy writes the prequel to the Anastasia myth. She creates a fictional history for Franziska Schanzkowska, the Polish factory worker who so successfully donned the mantle of the doomed princess. From the few facts that are known, Morrissy fashions the biography of a nobody - an impoverished Polish childhood, an adolescence set against the First World war and the ruinous humiliation of Germany in defeat, a young adulthood blighted by violence, trauma and loss. The Pretender is a nesting doll of a book. Morrissy unspools the multiple intricacies of female identity and explores the strategies that women employ to survive in a calamitous world. Was Franziska Schanzkowska a fraud? Was she de

Mary Morrissy

She is a true heir to Chekhov and the great writers…  Her clear-eyed vision and her deep compassion, along with her lovely sense of the comic and her exceptional literary articulacy, make this an outstanding collection.

Mary Morrissy is a wonderful writer. These stories are entertaining and deft, so skilfully balanced and interwoven that when you begin to pick out the pattern it is a real moment of delight.

Morrissy bewitches the reader with an immaculate yet irreverent turn of phrase, her imagination slanted at a rare angle.

Story by story [Morrissy] stitches together a hundred tiny plots, moving backwards and forwards across 60 years, and outwards to Italy, America, Australia and Vietnam… Morrissy proves herself a steady observer of the bleakness of everyday life, as well as when bleakness becomes catastrophe.

One of the best Irish books you’ll read this year.

There’s a psychological acuity and emotional understanding to Mary Morrissy’s stories, along with a barbed wit, that can only be achieved by the very best of writers… These 18 stories are so crammed with warmth, wit and insight that I wished for 18 more. Marvellous.

Makes for exquisite reading… We are left with the urge to go back and read the book again as so many layers of meaning and possible interpretations co exist inside the tome… Morrissy succeeds in creating a deeply moving work here, one that remains in the mind and the heart, a work of great subtlety and depth, a truly Irish book with a sweeping international feel, a work that asks the big questions and yet these questions are asked with the wisdom necessary to see that for some questions the answers are too daunting to do anything more than raise them and continue to raise them and lead readers and other writers to the doorway of moral choice.

Morrissy wafts pungent scents of our dirty old town at us in her collection of short stories… Morrissy is not without humour, sometimes offering laugh-out-loud observations. But the undercurrent throughout brings to mind Thoreau's line about most men (and women) living lives of quiet desperation. Her style, her intense moments of close clinical dissection, reminds me a little of John Banville. But she shows more compassion for her cast of characters, perhaps not unlike Alice Munro. All human life is indeed there in Prosperity Drive… It’s a magnificent read.

Demands that the reader immerse herself within its world… Much of the considerable power of Morrissy’s prose lies in her technique of dipping seamlessly in and out of temps perdu… Prosperity Drive’s epipahnic moments recall Joyce’s Dubliners… The compassion, immediacy, humour and delicacy with which Morrissy depicts their [her character’s] predicaments result in moments of profundity.

A master of language, she is also a keen observer of human nature… I simply loved these stories for their diversity… Sheer perfection throughout… She has the same forensic eye for detail; the same analytical touch, and sleight of language, allied with a quite astonishing ability to get inside her characters’ minds.

The author’s blend of beady-eyed humour and genuine empathy may remind readers of William Trevor.

Sam Miller's memoir Fathers is ostensibly about a family secret. But its true subject is a family silence… The book is about ways to be a father, but also, more generally, about ways to be a man, from the 1950s to now. Should you be an intellectual, and write letters full of irony and wit? How camp are you allowed to be, or how fearful of homoeroticism? Must you be good at manual labour? Where do you stand in relation to class or entitlement? Should you be more interested in football than you are?

Morrissy has been compared to Joyce and Chekov. She’s brilliant.

Mary Morrissy’s persuasive stories sidle up to you quietly and before you know it have you wrapped up in their embrace… We meet people on the edge… in this resonant collection from an accomplished writer.

An outstanding collection…She is a true heir to Chekhov and the great writers

‘A wonderful writer’ Hilary Mantel 
 
All of life is laid bare in Prosperity Drive. A woman falls and remembers a moment decades earlier that changed the course of her life. A failed priest teaches children to swim at the YMCA. A teenage girl takes a spanner to the car of the young man who has driven her home. A honeymoon in Venice goes disastrously wrong. A man is reunited with his first love in an airport departure lounge. All of the characters begin their journeys on Prosperity Drive, appear and disappear, bump into each other in chance encounters, and join up again through love, marriage or memory in this mesmerising book.

Mary Morrissy

Praise for Prosperity Drive

She is a true heir to Chekhov and the great writers… Her clear-eyed vision and her deep compassion, along with her lovely sense of the comic and her exceptional literary articulacy, make this an outstanding collect ...

Mary Morrissy is a wonderful writer. These stories are entertaining and deft, so skilfully balanced and interwoven that when you begin to pick out the pattern it is a real moment of delight.

Morrissy bewitches the reader with an immaculate yet irreverent turn of phrase, her imagination slanted at a rare angle.

She is a true heir to Chekhov and the great writers… Her clear-eyed vision and her deep compassion, along with her lovely sense of the comic and her exceptional literary articulacy, make this an outstanding collect ...

Mary Morrissy is a wonderful writer. These stories are entertaining and deft, so skilfully balanced and interwoven that when you begin to pick out the pattern it is a real moment of delight.

Morrissy bewitches the reader with an immaculate yet irreverent turn of phrase, her imagination slanted at a rare angle.

She is a true heir to Chekhov and the great writers… Her clear-eyed vision and her deep compassion, along with her lovely sense of the comic and her exceptional literary articulacy, make this an outstanding collect ...

Mary Morrissy is a wonderful writer. These stories are entertaining and deft, so skilfully balanced and interwoven that when you begin to pick out the pattern it is a real moment of delight.

Morrissy bewitches the reader with an immaculate yet irreverent turn of phrase, her imagination slanted at a rare angle.

Books by Mary Morrissy

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