John Murray announces Lisa McInerney’s latest novel The Rules of Revelation.
John Murray has announced a new novel by Women’s Prize and Desmond Elliott Award winner Lisa McInerney. The Rules of Revelation, again set in Cork and with a ‘riotous cast of characters’, is published in hardback ebook and audio on 13 May.
Described as ‘powerful blast of sex, scandal, obsession, great nationalists, bad mothers, love, feminism, gender, music, class, transgression, reckonings, reunions, recriminations and a debut album that might drive the whole of Ireland mad’, The Rules of Revelation follows Mel, who comes back to Cork from Britain following the resurgence of a family scandal, revolutionary Maureen who wants to rewrite her city’s history, former sex worker Georgie who’s urged to tell her story by a journalist, and Karine, preparing for her ex-boyfriend’s return.
The cover artwork has been designed by screenprinter Kate Gibb, who has also designed the covers for the reissues of The Glorious Heresies and The Blood Miracles, due out in April.
Publisher Jocasta Hamilton said: “Lisa combines prose with an irrepressible energy and a tenderness for the fragile bravado of her characters. While reeling from their pasts and anxious about their futures, they are as deeply charismatic as they are damaged. I finished The Rules of Revelation on the best kind of a reading high – dazzled by language, thoroughly entertained and caring deeply.”
McInerney said: “I think this is the most personal of my three novels, in that it’s about art, and making art when you don’t come from a background that actively encourages it, finding your voice in a world that you’re not entirely comfortable in. The novel is set in a newly confident Ireland, after those two huge referendums (marriage equality and abortion rights), and it was exciting to be able to pull the lens back a bit and focus on a version of Ireland that actually might allow my characters in, for a change… I wanted to celebrate how Ireland’s changed so fast for the better, and explore what that might mean for five stubborn and perceptive misfits, but equally I was driven to acknowledge genuine disparity, especially that between contemporary, commercialised feminism and working-class life, and focus on people on the periphery of feminism, either left behind by it, or not quite at peace with it as a movement or philosophy.”
McInerney’s debut novel, The Glorious Heresies, won the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction 2016 and the Desmond Elliott Prize, and her second novel, The Blood Miracles, won the Encore Award. The books have sold more than 150,000 copies, and McInerney has been commissioned to write a six-part TV series based on her books by ITV Studios in conjunction with RTE.
Text from Bookbrunch.
