IRON ANNIE

LUKE CASSIDY

Mixing Thelma and Louise and Lisa McInerney’s The Glorious Heresies, with a dash of Pulp Fiction, Iron Annie heralds the arrival of a major new Irish writer.

“I still think’a her every day, several times a day.”

Aoife knows everyone in Dundalk’s underworld. Too well, in some cases. But when she meets Annie, a beautiful whirlwind of a woman, and brings her to the Town, she finds that she doesn't know nearly enough about her. Annie is magnetic and wild and Aoife’s desire to learn more quickly becomes a need, and then an obsession – to know this dangerous woman, to love her, to keep her. So when Aoife’s friend and collaborator the Rat King asks her to help him dispose of ten kilos of cocaine, swiped from a rival, she brings Annie along for a road trip through a Britain that she only knows as a place to be suspicious of. So when Annie decides she doesn’t want to return to Ireland, Aoife makes a decision that changes everything.

Gritty and yet tender, tragic and yet hopeful, Iron Annie is a breakneck journey that crackles with energy, warmth and heart, and marks the arrival of a fresh and vibrant new voice in literary fiction.

^{"What an exquisite novel Iron Annie is. The narrative voice fair crackles: it’s full of wonder, grit, insight, sadness and joy, and is quite beautiful. And Aoife is one of those fictional characters that arrives only once or twice in an age, sublimely rendered and completely unforgettable."}

^{- Donal Ryan, author of The Spinning Heart and From a Low
and Quiet Sea}

^{"It’s apparent from the opening lines of Iron Annie that Luke Cassidy can write. His prose fizzes with energy and music, and the reader is immediately plunged into the anarchic underbelly of Ireland and the lives of Cassidy’s vivid characters."}

^{- Graeme Macrae Burnet, author of His Bloody Project}

^{"It’s wild and fierce and full of awful life. Also dead funny . . . This needs to be slapped on the arse and let out snorting into the world like a mustang horse"}

^{- Niall Griffiths, author
of Grits, Sheepshagger and Stump}

THE AUTHOR

Luke Cassidy is a writer from Dundalk, Ireland. He has adapted his novel, Iron Annie, for the stage as the Iron Annie Cabaret, a spectacle of spoken word and music based on the book, which will tour twenty theatres in Ireland with the support of the Irish Arts Council. A short story of his, A Good Turn, will be featured in the forthcoming New Island Books anthology of writing from the Irish border region, The New Frontier. Iron Annie is his first novel.

IRON ANNIE

LUKE CASSIDY

JUNCTURE