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Odran Yates enters Clonliffe Seminary in 1972 after his mother informs him that he has a vocation to the priesthood. He goes in full of ambition and hope, dedicated to his studies and keen to make friends.
Forty years later, Odran’s devotion has been challenged by the widespread revelations of sexual abuse that have shattered the Irish people’s faith in the church. He has seen friends stand trial, colleagues jailed, the lives of young parishioners destroyed. Father Odran Yates looks back on a religious life that left him oblivious to the sexual perversion of some of his diocesan colleagues and to the cover-ups routinely engineered by his clerical bosses. Father Yates is naïve in the extreme - he never wonders why his lifelong friend and fellow Clonliffe novice Cardle, has been moved from parish to parish 11 times. Even when Cardle opts to stay the night in the home of Odran’s young nephew, Odran remains oblivious.
But when a family tragedy opens wounds from his past, he is forced to confront the demons that have raged within a once respected institution and recognise his own complicity in their propagation.
It has taken John Boyne (author of the highly recommended and best-selling The Absolutist) fifteen years and twelve novels to write about his home country of Ireland but he has done so now in his most powerful novel to date, a novel about blind dogma and moral courage, and about the dark places where the two can meet. At once courageous and intensely personal, A History of Loneliness confirms Boyne as one of the most searching chroniclers of his generation.
Author : John Boyne
Paperback Published July 2015 380 Pages