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The Storm

Robert Cranny
ISBN 9781566491891 (paperback)
Published in October 2001
MSRP $14.00
Jackie Kelly is born into exile as he is born into Ireland--a country racked with ancient enmities, where love is a burden and the past an inescapable prison. Set in a working-class suburb of Dublin during the 1940s, this novel tells the story of young Jackie's journey toward actual, physical exile. It is a novel of pride and estrangement, of fathers and sons, of passions so strong that they wear out the bodies they inhabit.

First published in 1982 as On Us Thy Poor Children, The Storm is a tender, lyrical, harsh and wild novel. And Cranny, in the tradition of Brian Moore and Frank O'Connor, masterfully demonstrates his ability to write with wit and eloquence, casting a sharp, sorrowful eye on the life and death of an Irish family.



"We've all heard of Artistic Distance, I'm sure--whereby a writer who has departed a locale writes more impressively about it than those who have remained in it could ever hope to do. James Joyce is probably the classic example of the phenomenon, but Robert Cranny is no mean runner-up...it's a poetic book, a prose poem really, with an almost mystical devotion to nature and the inner recesses of the impressionable mind...Masterly, reminiscent of such writers as Dickens, Trevor, Dylan Thomas, even Joyce himself." - The Dublin Evening Herald

"(The Storm) is a different breed of book...Cranny evokes his characters with undeniable feeling by writing about them as if they matter...Cranny never telegraphs his plot. He lets it flow like a force of nature." - Chicago Sun Times

"Robert Cranny's The Storm is a moving and powerful work of fiction. Its magic combination of poetry and insight, of unfailing artistry and unflinching honesty, make it a work of enduring significance in the canon of Irish literature." - Peter Quinn

"We've waited too long for this re-issue of Robert Cranny's novel, The Storm. Since the book was first published in 1982 we've seen dozens of memoirs come and go on both sides of the Atlantic, but this book is too valuable a document to be left in limbo. It is a family story--lyrical and hard, filled with compassion and leavened with ready good humor. When you put the book down you'll want to say, More, Robert Cranny, more." - Frank McCourt