The Pilgrimage
John Broderick author Colm Tóibín editor
Format:Paperback
Publisher:The Lilliput Press Ltd
Publishing:7th May '26
£10.99
This title is due to be published on 7th May, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
Banned on its 1961 release and long overlooked, The Pilgrimage returns as a startlingly modern portrait of desire, secrecy and small‑town conformity. John Broderick’s fearless debut follows Julia Glynn, a respectable wife in an Irish midlands town whose carefully arranged life begins to fracture after a series of anonymous letters expose the frailty of the world she inhabits.
As Julia, her ailing husband, their watchful manservant and an ambitious young doctor prepare for a pilgrimage to Lourdes, the novel plunges into the hypocrisies, longings and unspoken tensions that shape a society crackling with self-awareness and concealed passions.
Darkly comic, unsettling and steeped in the atmosphere of 1950s Ireland, The Pilgrimage offers a daring exploration of sexuality, power and self‑deception. Tt stands as a vivid, transgressive classic that feels as provocative, and as essential, as ever.
“A taut stylish book that surely read like an incendiary device at the time . . . Broderick’s tightly controlled style is awash with the sharp humour of recognition. He exposes Catholicism but has no need to mock it. People go through empty rituals of observance and lead utterly secular and selfish lives, but it doesn’t mean God isn’t watching. With The Pilgrimage, Athlone found its Balzac . . . a man unafraid to confront taboos at a time when others felt it wiser to keep their heads down.”
-- Dermot Bolger“Broderick’s once-banned novel inhabits the moral middle ground of the apparently righteous, displaying the desires and confusions of his characters’ inner lives without much mercy, but without judgment, either.”
ISBN: 9781843519775
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
230 pages