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  • Published: 25 May 2022
  • ISBN: 9781844885244
  • Imprint: Penguin General UK
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 288
  • RRP: $32.99

Sorry for Your Trouble

The Irish Way of Death



Inside the intimate rituals of death in Ireland

The Irish do death differently. Funeral attendance is a solemn duty - but it can also be a social highlight, requiring sophisticated crowd control, creative parking solutions and a high-end sound system. In Sorry for Your Trouble, Ann Marie Hourihane holds up a mirror to the Irish way of death: the funny bits, the sad bits, and the hard-to-explain bits that tell us so much about who we are.

She follows the last weeks of a woman's life in hospice; she witnesses an embalming; she attends inquests; and she goes to funerals, of ordinary and extraordinary people all over the country - including that of her own father during a global pandemic. Shedding fresh, wise and witty light on a key pillar of Irish culture, it is one of the best books ever written about Irish life.

  • Published: 25 May 2022
  • ISBN: 9781844885244
  • Imprint: Penguin General UK
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 288
  • RRP: $32.99

Praise for Sorry for Your Trouble

Ann Marie Hourihane is the most elegant and insightful chronicler of contemporary Ireland. In Sorry for Your Trouble she explores perhaps the most distinctive aspect of its culture with compassion, erudition, wit and a wonderful precision of feeling and expression. This is, paradoxically, an endlessly vivid reflection, not just on Irish life, but on life itself. Funny, brilliant and deeply moving, it is a lamp to hold up against the dying of the light

Fintan O'Toole

A beautiful, insightful reflection on a very, very peculiar country's approach to the oddest experience of them all

Ryan Tubridy

Hugely moving and illuminating. All of life, somehow, is here

Tanya Sweeney, Irish Independent

Powerful

Patrick Freyne, Irish Times

Moving, comforting and funny, everything a good Irish send-off should be

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