Advance Praise for Malarky

"Good writing and dark wit always excite me and they come together thrillingly in this book. It has a quiet grip on the strangeness of the interior and exterior worlds of love and politics and their inextricability. I delighted in the writing and the scope - macro and microscopic."-Jenny Diski

"Malarky spins and glitters like a coin flipped in the air--now searingly tragic, now blackly funny. The language is joyful and exuberant, the characters thoughtful and deeply felt. Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant." -Annabel Lyon


With Malarky, Anakana Schofield has delivered a character as extraordinary as Brecht's Mother Courage, and a domestic situation that rivals Beckett's Endgame for its stagnant and sorrowful absurdity.

Our Woman Philomena has just caught her son Jimmy in the barn with another man. She's been accosted by Red the Twit, who energetically discloses the infidelities-real, imagined, or in any event peculiar-of Our Woman's husband.

Swamped by a confusion she refuses to let overcome her, Philomena embarks on rural odyssey that skirts madness, passes through grief, and returns her to the remarkable resilience of spirit that will make Our Woman the character of the decade. Schofield's wicked humour is everywhere apparent, and Malarky, brilliantly drawn in the cadences of contemporary Ireland, is an absolutely peerless tour-de-force.


Anakana Schofield is an Irish-Canadian writer of fiction, drama, essays, and literary criticism. She contributes to the London Review of Books, The Recorder: The Journal of the American Irish Historical Society, the Globe & Mail, and the Vancouver Sun. She has lived in London and Dublin, and now resides in Vancouver. Malarky is her first novel.