A sparkling satirical novel by one of Ireland's foremost playwrights
A Wild People, Hugh Leonard's ebullient first novel, throws us into the world of T. J. Quill, who, not entirely on purpose, has become the archivist for the late great Western filmmaker Sean O'Fearna.
Quill's friend Thornton got him into it - as he tends to get people involved in his schemes, whether it's The James Joyce Restaurant, or screening a lost cinema classic at night in a hurricane-whipped peat bog, or deciding that O'Fearna's masterpiece The Man from Innisfree is in need of a sequel...
Not only does Quill have to cope with Thornton's antics, he's also torn between his mercurial wife Greta and an Italian 'madonna' - whose husband may not be as stupid as he looks...
A Wild People is the perfect antidote to Frank McCourt-style 'Oirish' whimsy, sideswiping at stereotypes as it walks the line between life's comic absurdity and its darker depths. Both tender and uncompromising, its biting humour reveals Leonard's shockingly accurate insight into the fallibility of the human heart.