IN THE FOREST, set in the west of Ireland, is the story of a young man who shoots dead three people in a forest glade. The young man, Mich O'Kane, is 'not all there in the head' as one character puts it. By puberty he is already committing petty crimes, ending up in borstal. By the time he is back home he has also served time in a British jail and is an institutionalised criminal. His sexual fantasies - revolving around women in the village - eventually centre on Eily, an artist and single mother, who lives with her son Maddie. One day Mich pounces, and orders Eily to drive them to the woods nearby...
Author Biography
Edna O'Brien is the author of 19 books. She was the winner of the 1993 Writers' Guild Prize for Fiction. Her biography of James Joyce was published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in June 1999. Her recent fiction has been about Irish to;pic - religion, politics, property. In 2001 her documentary novel, In the Forest - about a brutal murder on the west coast - caused a furore in her native Ireland. It was the subject of a BBC Omnibus film.
