Publishers Weekly
★ 09/28/2020
In Gilligan’s remarkable latest (after Nine Folds Make a Paper Swan), a group of eight men known as the Butchers slaughter and dress cattle on a series of farms in Ireland, practicing ancient rituals meant to ward off a curse. As mad cow disease upends the British beef industry in 1996, American photographer Ronan Monks shoots a photo of a dead man hanging from a meat hook driven through his feet in County Monaghan, where Monks has come to photograph life in the Irish border counties. The man in Monks’s photo is a Butcher, but the circumstances of his death remain mysterious for much of the novel, which flashes forward to 2018, with Monks planning to show the photo for the first time. The bulk of the narrative uses four viewpoints: Grá, lonely after her husband leaves for the Butchers’ long annual journey, is attracted to Monks. Grá’s daughter, Úna, reveres the Butcher heritage and hopes to become the first female Butcher. She practices their rituals and knife skills while her classmates’ bullying tempts her to violence. Dairy farmer Fionn joins a risky cattle smuggling scheme in order to pay for treatments at a clinic he believes could cure his wife’s brain cancer. Fionn’s son, Davey, hopes his college entrance exams will qualify him to study in Dublin. As the desperate protagonists discover how far they will go for their desires, their stories illuminate the power of myth, the tensions between past and present, and the weight of family expectations. With beautifully crafted prose, suspenseful plotting, and imaginative scope, Gilligan’s off to a blazing start. (Nov.)Correction: An earlier version of this review incorrectly stated this was the author's first novel.
BookBrowse
"An achingly real portrayal of rural life in Ireland and an ode to the Republic’s fraught history with its own folklore."
Jan Carson
"Remarkable. . . . Realistic and hauntingly otherworldly."
BuzzFeed
"Gripping, Gothic, and moody."
Booklist
"A gripping tale of menace and foreboding."
The Guardian
"Grips throughout, offering a vivid portrait of one of Ireland’s less heralded corners."
Evie Wyld
"Excellent . . . completely gripping."
Colum McCann
"Gilligan braids beauty and brutality together in a seamless literary thriller. With plot twists worthy of Tana French and language reminiscent of Téa Obreht, this young Irish writer has crafted a story that is dark, wild, mythic, unsuspecting, and absolutely riveting."
Luke Kennard
"Flawlessly, intricately plotted, with such a compelling central mystery that I binged it like a Netflix show. . . . Stunning."
PopSugar
"Steeped in the rich history of Ireland."
Donal Ryan
"I was hooked from the first page. It was an exhilarating, unsettling reading experience: I felt at once like an outsider and completely at home as I read and was at all times completely immersed and wowed at Ruth's storytelling prowess."
The Irish Times
"Masterful."
B&N Reads
"An achingly beautiful novel of family, tradition, Ireland and the deep secrets buried in all three."
Kirkus Reviews
2020-08-19
A contemplative coming-of-age thriller set against a modernizing Ireland.
Gilligan’s latest opens with the description of a photo: It's a dead man strung up by his feet like a cow. The photographer has never shown the image until now, although he believes it to be his finest work: “The Butcher,” is how he imagines it would be labeled. “County Monaghan, 1996.” The subject had belonged to a group of ritual cattle slaughters, eight men who’d roamed the countryside on foot, keeping the old customs alive for those who still believed. Then the novel skips backward in time, to 1996 and the circumstances that led to that one arresting image. It is a classic mystery format—start with the ending, then trace how we got here—but the novel is hardly a classic mystery. What unfolds instead is an understated family saga pulsing with quiet foreboding. There is a low hum of violence in the background, and the mounting threat of mad cow disease is never far away. At the story’s heart is 12-year-old Úna; the daughter of a Butcher, she yearns to carry on the tradition herself despite the supposed limitations of her gender. But there is also Úna’s mother, Grá, beautiful and lonely, haunted by the loss of her estranged sister, who left the family for the modern world. There is Fionn, a desperate dairy farmer with a dying wife trying to make good, and Fionn’s bookish son, Davey, whose penchant for the classics is his ticket out. And yet the strength here is not the richness of the characters—Úna, especially, feels generically free-spirited, a standard-issue tween literary heroine—but the richness of the world. It’s an atmospheric portrait of a country at a crossroads, moving away from the traditional ways and toward a slick new millennial future. Thoroughly lovely.
Cattle have never been so riveting.
