Red Dirt by E.M. Reapy
In the run-up to the publication of his debut novel, Pure Innocent Boy, Patrick Doherty takes us through some of his favourite Irish books.
I grew up in an era of box-ticking. Do College. Do your J1. Do a music festival. Do Asia. And, perhaps most importantly: Do Australia. That was the order of business before one was expected to return home and settle down into real life. However, post-financial crisis, the nature of doing Australia changed. As job opportunities dried up at home, people were no longer choosing to go there. Suddenly, the trip down under became eerily similar to what it had been during the Nineteenth Century.
E.M. Reapy captures this moment of history with heartbreaking precision in her debut novel, Red Dirt. It tells the story of three Irish immigrants who arrive in Australia in the early 2010s in search of economic opportunities. Murph, Fiona, and Hopper, despite coming from different strata of Irish society, find themselves thrown together in the haphazard world of hostels, binge-drinking, and farms the size of Leitrim. Floundering in the precarity of their prospects, life-changing mistakes are made.
I suspect Red Dirt touched a nerve among readers who came of age during this period, not to mention the parents who watched their children leave. Although I didn’t make the trip myself, I distinctly remember this shift in the paradigm. Gradually, the stories filtering back from Australia were no longer of a gap-year-like adventure, but rather the stuff of sad Irish ballads sung as the lights inside your local pub blink for last orders.
(c) Patrick Doherty
Patrick Doherty is a writer from Ireland, now living in Seville with his wife and two daughters. His debut novel, Pure Innocent Boy, will be published by Dedalus Books in October.
Pre-order Pure Innocent Boy here.
Order your copy of Red Dirt online here.
And read Patrick’s review of The Ghost Estate by John Connell on Writing.ie here.
