All the Bad Apples

Description

The stunning new novel about shocking family secrets, silenced female voices and dangerous truths from the author of The Accident Season. The day after the funeral all our mourning clothes hung out on the line like sleeping bats. 'This will be really embarrassing,' I kept saying to my family, 'when she shows up at the door in a week or two.' On Deena's seventeenth birthday, the day she finally comes out to her family, her wild and mysterious sister Mandy is seen leaping from a cliff. The family is heartbroken, but not surprised. The women of the Rys family have always been troubled - 'bad apples', their father calls them - and Mandy is the baddest of them all. But then Deena starts to receive the letters. Letters from Mandy, claiming that their family's blighted history is not just bad luck or bad decisions, but a curse, handed down to the Rys women through the generations. Mandy has gone in search of the curse's roots, and now Deena must begin a desperate cross-country hunt for her sister, guided only by the letters that mysteriously appear in each new place. What Deena finds will heal their family's rotten past - or rip it apart forever.

Moira is half-French, half-Irish and lives in Dublin where she writes magic realism, reads tarot cards and raises witch babies. Moira's first novel, The Accident Season, was shortlisted for the Waterstones Children's Book Prize and received widespread critical acclaim. Her second, Spellbook of the Lost and Found, was shortlisted for an Irish Book Award.

Exquisite . . . It's a gorgeous set-up for a magical realist dive into today's teenagers confronting the hideous heritage of this country. This is a book to hold tightly to your chest * Irish Times * This lyrical, furious examination of victimised, silenced Irish women is compelling * Guardian * This is beautiful, visceral writing; a primal scream that serves as a damning indictment of the way women have been treated in this country * Louise O'Neill, author of Asking For It * Tender and fierce, full of blessings and curses, a fiery avenging angel of a book. I loved how it tied together family and tragedy and history and destiny, winding through generations and knitting everyone together, and, most of all, how it kept the crimes committed against young women who stray from the path at its heart, and exposed them to the sky, turning judgement on the judges, exposing the hypocrisy of it all. I am in absolute awe of it * Melinda Salisbury, author of The Sin Eater's Daughter * Fowley-Doyle travels through generations, examining the power women possess, the things that have been taken from them, and the things they fight to reclaim . . . An astonishingly potent offering to women who break the mould * Booklist * An uncompromising, raw tale . . . Told in a mix of letters, family stories, and narrative, this devastating novel manages to find hope for the future while sending pointed messages that are as vital as they are timely * Publishers Weekly * Beautiful and visceral, All the Bad Apples is for readers who've had enough of shame and secrets. This essential book unearths what patriarchy wants to keep buried, dragging truth into the light with a fierce belief in the power of telling stories. Moira Fowley-Doyle has crafted a tale devastating in its universality * Joy McCullough, author of Blood Water Paint * Intense social motivation sits easily alongside loveable characters and a compelling narrative . . . All The Bad Apples isn't just about evil doings, it's about silence too, and the complicity of that silence - the further evil done by knowing and not saying . . . The most emotive moment comes when the characters, previously almost crushed by their fate, realise the enormous power of telling their stories, loudly and without fear * Irish Independent * Compelling . . . the book has a simmering, authentically righteous fury * Bulletin for the Center of Children's Books * Hints of magic, from a family curse to a banshee's wail, amplify the sense of mystery . . . evocative writing, eerie details, and intense emotional content. Compelling * Kirkus * With a memorable blend of magic and reality, Fowley-Doyle tells a harrowing and ultimately empowering story * The Horn Book *