IRON ANNIE

The adventures of a small-time criminal whose mettle is truly tested when she leaves the hard-edged Irish border town she calls home to embark on a perilous mission in neighboring yet utterly alien England.

In this free-wheeling, foulmouthed monologue-as-novel, we enter the close-knit underworld of a small, unlovely town on the redundant border between Ireland and Northern Ireland where our heroine, Aoife, plies a modest trade in drugs and knockoff alcohol. “Most'a the Smirnoff ye dink narth’a the Boyne is brewed in Mullaghbawn, Drumintee an Forkhill,” she explains of her rural territory. “Fuckin first-class stuff too. Gets ye where yer goin sure.” With trusted colleagues to rely on—chiefly Shamey Hughes, poet, singer, and muscle when necessary, and the stalwart Rat King, a respected patriarch in the Traveller community—Aoife is running her business smoothly when the mercurial, highly educated Annie enters her life, captures her heart, and puts old loyalties to the test. “She doesn know too much bowt the proper temptation that’s in poverty,” Aoife observes of Annie’s leftist pronouncements. “But that’s grand. I love her so I do. So I can let her run. Cause I know she’ll come backta me.” Employing language that is at times as poetic as it is profane (a shoreline, for example, appears “like a tear between sea and sky”) and with razor-sharp sardonic wit, the novel hurtles through a handful of loosely connected episodes, each entertaining enough, though some verging on slapstick or, worse, sentimentality, before finding its feet in a somewhat predictable plot. As a favor to Rat King—and to spare her town a gangland showdown—Aoife travels to England with a substantial amount of cocaine to unload and with Annie along to complicate matters. What follows is as entertaining as what went before, and Aoife’s acerbic view of Brexit England is as bracing as her earlier take on urban Ireland’s moneyed smugness. But mayhem and tragedy inevitably ensue. Leaving some essential plot threads dangling, the narrative returns home, to the only safe place.

A vibrant, profane narrative of heartwarming criminality.