THIRSTY GHOSTS

Emer Martin's is a radical, vital voice in Irish writing, as she challenges the history of silence, institutional lies, evasion and the mistreatment of women across mid-to-late twentieth-century Ireland.

Two families inhabit this immersive polyvocal work, an intergenerational saga announced with The Cruelty Men (2018) and continued here as punk rockers and Magdalene laundries spiral into a post-colonial Ireland still haunted by its tribal undertow. Scenes surface from Ireland's mythological past, Tudor plantations, workhouses and industrial schools, the Troubles laid bare, the transformative pre-digital decades playing out in this propulsive narrative. Thirsty Ghosts is epic in scope while intimate in focus.

Emer Martin is a Dubliner who spent formative years in Paris, London, the Middle East and New York. She now lives with her family in southern California where she teaches writing, painting and resisting.

Her garlanded debut novel, Breakfast in Babylon, won Book of the Year 1996 at Listowel Writers' Week. Her second, More Bread or I'll Appear, was published in 1999. Baby Zero, her third novel, came out in 2007. She was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2000 and founded the publishing cooperative Rawmeash in 2014. The Cruelty Men was published by the Lilliput Press in 2018 and shortlisted for the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year in 2019.Emer Martin is a Dubliner who has lived in Paris, London, the Middle East, and various parts of the USA. Her first novel, Breakfast in Babylon, won Book of the Year 1996 at the prestigious Listowel Writers' Week. More Bread Or I'll Appear, her second novel, was published internationally in 1999. Her third novel, Baby Zero, was published in the UK and Ireland March 2007, and released in the USA in 2014. She has worked as a theatrical producer and publisher, founding publishing cooperative Rawmeash in 2014. Emer was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2000. She now lives between California and Co. Meath in Ireland.