Dermot Healy

Traces the imaginary attempts of an alcoholic playwright to restore his ex-lover, attempts that encompass the Protestant and Catholic sides of Ireland

A Goat's Song

Long time, no see

Men to the Right, Women to the Left

Neil Murphy

Keith Hopper

Collected Plays

The Long Swim

Dermot Healy's poems "project an open, rugged humanity, celebratory of common life" -- The Irish Times. In this second collection, Healy broadens his focus from his communal devotions to the quick of the natural world. Local speech patterns incorporate idiosyncratic observations and sometimes surreal incursions. In a book busy with life -- "Everything is on the go. Time is moving inland". -- Dermot Healy registers sounds and silences in ultimately peaceful ways.

What the Hammer

Peter Fallon

Collected Poems

The Ballyconnell Colours (Gallery Books)

Ollie Ewing has returned home from London to Sligo. In a daze, Ollie goes from job to job and from lodging to lodging until he settles in a run-down house with a group of art students. At night the noise comes from the street-drunks, screaming women, church bells, taxis, skinheads. Mornings he wakes up wondering what had happened, then goes to bed the next night wondering what will. Haunted by memories, Ollie hears voices interrogating him. And so unravels the story of the time he spent in London and how he has reached his present state of near madness. As he embarks on his journey to confront his experiences, we are led into the world of racketeering, sinister bosses, murder, and the hard, squalid life of foreign workers. A powerful, richly told story of an Irish working-class family, Sudden Times is original in concept and execution, tough but blessed with humor and empathy.

Sudden Times

Bend for Home

Tempi improvvisi

Like many of the great Irish writers before him, Dermot Healy first announced himself as a writer of intricate and innovative short stories. Healy's stories are set in small-town Ireland and its rural environs, and in the equally suffocating confines of the Irish expat communities in London. Throughout these texts, Healy demonstrates a deep sense of compassion towards the marginalized and the dispossessed, without ever becoming sentimental or clichéd. The language is earthy and imagistic by turn, and he continually seeks to extend the formal boundaries of the genre.Gathering all of Healy's stories together for the first time, this collection includes the long prose-drama "Before the Off" and Healy's final short works, "Along the Lines" and "Images."

The Collected Short Stories

Dermot Healy's fourth collection presents itself as a book-length poem that charts the annual migrations of thousands of barnacle geese between their breeding grounds in Greenland and their winter quarters on an island beside his home. Section titles suggest stations on their route: 'The Leavings', 'The Arrowhead' and 'The Wild Goose Chase'. From renewed joy 'as they come - from gaggle to skein - in beautiful stitches / along a thread' the book's formal pattern displays a new skill as it reflects and records 'the story of two homes' and the shapes and sounds of their marvellous routines.

A Fool's Errand

Ollie Ewing has forgotten the thing that tells him who he is. The hero of Dermott Healey's Sudden Times has returned to Sligo to recover from "a few experiences" in London by laying low and listening to "complaints and sermons, jibes and asides" in his own head. Men are after him. A crowd of them. Or maybe not. He's in hiding, mostly from his own shame. His brother Redmond and his best friend Marty are dead. It seems as though Marty died in a labouring accident but as snippets of Ollie's scatty recollections cohere, it becomes apparent that Marty was murdered, left in the back of a lorry, in a pile of charred bones. Redmond too, was flown home from Luton in a coffin and it isn't until much later in the novel that the details of his manslaughter are revealed. The deaths haunt Ollie and people in the town can see the danger in his eyes. His attempts to reintegrate socially and mentally are slack, confused, painful and absurdly funny. He shifts from job to job, finally getting routine and acceptance as a trolley check-out in Doyle's supermarket. "You have to break out before you can learn the laws of the tribe. And you have to break inside before you can learn your true nature." Ollie is often uncertain of time or place and dislocation overtakes him without warning, throwing the narrative back to London, forward to France, while Ollie is too frightened to move far at all.

A rivetting and dynamic portrait of rural Irish life from Magnum photographer Bruce Gilden.

After the Off

From “Ireland’s finest living novelist” (Roddy Doyle)—a funny, moving, exquisitely written novel about a community on the cusp of change Acclaimed Irish author Dermot Healy’s first novel in more than ten years is a rich, beguiling, and wonderfully funny story about community, family, love, and bonds across generations, an epic in miniature that features an unforgettable cast of innocents and broken eccentrics. The novel presents the bemusing and unsettling misadventures of Philip Feeney, known to one and all as Mister Psyche, a teenager haunted by a recent traumatic event who takes up with two men some fifty years his senior. Its still, lyrical power casts a miraculous literary spell and will appeal to readers of William Trevor, Roddy Doyle, John McGahern, and Anne Enright.

A Novel

Long Time, No See

Dermot Healy's fourth collection presents itself as a book-length poem that charts the annual migrations of thousands of barnacle geese between their breeding grounds in Greenland and their winter quarters on an island beside his home.

Long Time, No See introduces us to the unforgettable world of Mister Psyche . In the isolated coastal townland of Ballintra in the Northwest of Ireland Recent school-leaver, occasional worker, full-time companion and Malibu-provider to Uncle Joe-Joe and his friend, The Blackbird, Psyche is a boy on the cusp of adulthood, undone by a recent traumatic event. Hanging out with men some forty-plus years his senior proves hazardous for Mister Psyche when the appearance of a bullet-hole in Uncle Joe-Joe's window draws him into a series of (mis)-adventures which unsettle and bemuse. Perhaps The Blackbird is losing it? Or perhaps The General has decided to act on a decades-old grudge? Whichever way, as the paranoia grabs a creeping hold of Uncle Joe-Joe, his fragile world threatens to collapse. And it is Mister Psyche who must digest this and acknowledge the new world taking shape in the old ... An epic in miniature peopled by a cast of innocents and broken misfits, Long Time, No See's lyrical power casts a miraculous literary spell.

A funny, direct, lively and moving account of growing up in small-town Ireland. Healy lovingly coaxes his childhood into being until, one day, his elderly mother hands him the coded diary he kept as a teenage tearaway and the uncut past burst in like a blast of raw air.

Dermot Healy

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