Last Light Breaking

"Patrick Corcoran's first novel, Last Light Breaking, breaks a silence, telling the story of a survivor of the Great War slaughter who, fearing hostility to his British Army past in post-revolutionary Ireland, chose invisibility as a village postmaster in Somerset for forty years. Corcoran's evocations of a turn-of-the-century Carlow adolescence, dominated by religious mystification and sexual initiation, of chaotic trench warfare, and of inter-war seaside domesticity, are skilful and vivid, but it is in the description of the Connolly's late efforts to grapple with his emotional impoverishment and confusion that Corcoran's writing excels." – TLS

Connolly, old, recently widowed, body declining, is marooned in the house of his son in Wales. An Irishman from Carlow he joined the British army to escape poverty and found himself on the wrong side of the Irish conflict and the wrong side of the Irish Sea. At the end of his life Connolly can only wonder what form an 'Irish' life might have taken for him, and at the worth of his life as an outsider in England.

Patrick Corcoran's first novel is a delicately written exploration of exile, loss and guilt. Connolly is a memorable creation, and his at time humorous contemplation of the responsibilities of living a 'good' life results in a haunting novel about the Irish life in the twentieth century.