John Murray Publishers Ltd The Glorious Heresies: Winner of The Baileys'' Women's Prize for Fiction 2016

Best book I've read in a long time. I couldn't put it down. A rollicking great yarn that avoids the old Irish stereotypes and introduces a fantastic range of believable characters in a far from idyllic modern Ireland

The dark underbelly of contemporary Cork. A group of flawed people whose paths crossed because of an accidental death. None of the characters are good people, but neither are they bad, most are trying to be better. The writing and character development are excellent, although I think the ending left some loose ends. I don't know why reviews talk about the humor. To me it is a very dark story, with nothing humorous about it, but well worth reading!

She's a talented author and it's a worthwhile read but I question whether the critics who called it "funny" or even "hilarious" had bothered to open the book at all.

"The parents cast the mould for the little ones, and the little ones curved to fit." This, in a nutshell, is the theme of this amazing novel from a young Irish author. This is really a microcosm of the Irish underbelly in, of all cities, Cork. I was reminded of the Seattle depicted in the series The Killing since both are cities on water, of similar size, and both enjoy a public reputation as tourist destinations. But that is far from the seedy portrait depicted here, a world of gangsters and prostitutes and people scraping by on the fringes.It really began 40 years ago when unmarried pregnant girls were shipped off to the horrors of the Magdalene Laundries. Maureen was 19 when she gave birth to J P, and was thenceforth shipped off again, this time to London for 40 years, her son rising in notorious prominence to be the kingpin of Cork's crime world. When the book begins, Maureen finds herself back in Cork, being put up in one of her son's former brothels, and she is standing with a religious artifact in her hand which she has used to bash in the head of an intruder. The book rises out of this messy murder with at least 6 people's lives changed forever. Each character holds his or her own. The language is almost poetic in its brutality at times. McInerney is another of the amazing women writers coming out of Ireland these days, authors who don't write about the Ireland of shamrocks and pubs. It's no wonder that this book has won prestigious prizes already.

Well, this was tedious. This is one of those books in which a series of characters intersect with each other's lives in various fateful ways.It all starts when Maureen Phelan kills a stranger while he's breaking into her home. This prompts her estranged son Jimmy, an infamous gangster in their city or Cork, Ireland, to clean up her mess. The incident connects (albeit sometimes loosely) a few other characters: Ryan, a teen drug dealer, and his abusive father, Tony; Georgie, a local prostitute; and Tara, a nosy neighbor with a penchant for inserting herself into everyone's life.The narrative constantly moves from one character to the next, but the problem is none of them are all that interesting and it's hard to connect with any of them in such small doses. One of my biggest pet peeves is when a book gets bogged down by plot. There was so much focus on the intricate plot as it snowballed along, and a heavy reliance on coincidence to forge the often tenuous interactions. The random pacing and sudden jumps forward in time were disorienting and only further distanced me from the characters.I think this book wanted to be heavy and dark and bleak and poignant. And while I'm drawn to fiction that calls for us to empathize with even the most damaged and hopeless characters, the execution was so messy and forced that I had a hard time caring about anyone or anything that happened