Tune in to hear Ruth Gilligan discuss her novel The Butcher’s Blessing! This is a virtual event please register in advance here
Set in the gothic wilds of Ireland, The Butchers’ Blessing is a haunting and unforgettable thriller brimming with secrecy, tradition, and superstition.
Every year, Úna prepares for her father to leave her. He will wave goodbye early one morning, then disappear with seven other men to traverse the Irish countryside. Together, these men form the Butchers, a group that roams from farm to farm, enacting ancient methods of cattle slaughter.
The Butchers’ Blessing moves between the events of 1996 and the present, offering a simmering glimpse into the modern tensions that surround these eight fabled men. For Úna, being a Butcher’s daughter means a life of tangled ambition and incredible loneliness. For her mother, Grá, it’s a life of faith and longing, of performing a promise that she may or may not be able to keep. For nonbeliever Fionn, the Butchers represent a dated and complicated reality, though for his son, Davey, they represent an entirely new world—and potentially new love. For photographer Ronan, the Butchers are ideal subjects: representatives of an older, more folkloric Ireland whose survival is now being tested. As he moves through the countryside, Ronan captures this world image by image—a lake, a cottage, and his most striking photo: a man, hung upside down in a pose of unspeakable violence.
Thrilling, dark, and richly atmospheric, The Butchers’ Blessing is an engrossing incantation—mesmerizing in both language and story—conjuring a family and a country on the edge of irrevocable change.
About the Author:
Ruth Gilligan is a writer and academic from Dublin now based in the UK. She has published five books to date and was the youngest person ever to top the Irish Bestsellers’ List.
Her most recent novel,The Butchers, (published as The Butchers' Blessing in the US) is a literary thriller set in the Irish borderlands; it won the 2021 Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize, awarded to the book that best evokes the 'spirit of a place'.
Ruth holds degrees from Cambridge, Yale, UEA and Exeter. She contributes literary reviews to the Irish Independent, Guardian, TLS and LA Review of Books. She works as a Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Birmingham and is an ambassador for the global storytelling charity Narrative 4.
About the Moderator:
Michelle Gallen was born in Northern Ireland in the mid-1970s and grew up during the Troubles a few miles from the border between what she was told was the “Free” State and the “United” Kingdom. She studied English literature at Trinity College Dublin, then survived what doctors now suspect was autoimmune encephalitis in her mid-twenties. Her debut novel, Big Girl, Small Town was shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award. She now lives in Dublin with her husband and kids.