This month, GCN returns to the Dublin International Literature Festival for a very special Town Hall Talk featuring our editor Brian Finnegan in conversation with Jamie O’Neill, author of the Irish queer epic, At Swim Two Boys.
Set in the year before the Rising, the book focuses on the intimate friendship between Jim Mack, the son of an ambitious shopkeeper, and Doyler Doyle, the son of an old army buddy of Mr Mack. The boys make a pledge to swim from the Forty Foot to the nearby Muglins Rock on Easter Sunday 1916, as the political landscape of the nation changes forever. (MacMurrough, a gentleman returned from England after two years’ hard labour, provides wit and a window to the harsh realities of the world beyond the cosy confines of Glasthule.)