Ryan is now twenty years old and is trying to make things right with his long-term girlfriend, Karine, while at the same time, being drawn into arranging further drug shipments by exploiting his Italian connections. I’ve summarised this here because The Blood Miracles is a direct sequel to McInerney’s first novel and while I enjoyed reading it, I was disappointed that it largely offered more of the same, or at times, a bit less. Ex-drug addict, ex-prostitute Georgie also narrated sections, while the story of Maureen, the elderly mother of Cork’s most notorious gangster, Jimmy Phelan, added a welcome thread of black humour. Yet one of its strengths was that Ryan, if the emotional heart of the novel, was not its only focus. The Glorious Heresies centred on Ryan, who is only fifteen years old at the start of the novel, but is already being drawn into organised crime. Lisa McInerney’s debut, The Glorious Heresies, was absolutely brilliant a worthy winner of the Baileys Prize, it interweaved the stories of a number of utterly convincing characters in the drug-dealing underbelly of Cork while also daring to experiment with prose.
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