Endorsements

“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.” – Twice Booker-longlisted author Donal Ryan

“Iron Annie is a staggering debut novel. And what makes it so stylish and ferocious isn’t the drugs, the IRA, the brutal violence, or even the wild love and sex – it’s the language. I’ve never read anything like the sentences in here. Absolutely compulsive reading and an utterly inimitable book.” – Rachel DeWoskin, author of Banshee, Big Girl Small, and Foreign Babes in Beijing

“It’s apparent from the opening lines of Iron Annie that R. L. 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 the Man Booker-shortlisted His Bloody Project

“It’s wild and fierce and full of awful life. Also dead funny. The vernacular is captured perfectly and has in it (as the vernacular should) all the history of a place, the uniqueness, the particularity of a certain place at a certain time and all the stuff of human life that has produced that. It’s good stuff; the character, the first person, has to have sufficient dimensional depth to keep the words compelling and that it most certainly does. 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

“Iron Annie marks the arrival of a fresh and compelling young voice in literary fiction. These complex, funny, tender, lewd and lovely characters will grab you by the throat from the first line and dare you to stop reading. Steeped in the unique narratives of a border town, this novel tells an unforgettable story while also opening up the underworld of 21^st century Ireland.” – Emily Rapp Black, author of Poster Child, The Still Point of the Turning World, Cartography for Cripples and Sanctuary.

“I love the language, the world, the energy and wild elegance of Iron Annie. There is vividness and vitality to this world and his characters that is as theatrical as it is cinematic as it is poetic in its potential.” – Simon Stephens, Tony and Olivier prize-winning playwright, author of Pornography, Obsession, and the stage adaptation of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.