Scattered

Limerick, 1950.

The boys who once ran the lanes as gurriers are older now, though not yet ready for the world waiting to claim them. Childhood has frayed into work, hunger, Mass, dance halls, factory whistles, railway platforms, letters from England, and the first painful knowledge that friendship cannot hold every life in place.

As the decade unfolds, Louie, Seamus, Joe, Sean, Peter, Tony, Bardy, Maura, Eileen, Nora, Lingo, and the mysterious Gleamer move through a city caught between the old hardship of the lanes and the first uncertain shape of modern Ireland. Limerick is still a city of bacon factories, church bells, damp rooms, shop credit, mothers at thresholds, girls in factories, men waiting for work, and sons and daughters scattered by emigration. Yet beyond the old quays, Shannon begins to carry a new promise: work closer to home, a future not built entirely on departure, and the fragile possibility that the next generation may not have to leave in order to live.

Narrated by Limerick itself, SCATTERED is a lyrical, intimate portrait of a city and its people during the hard years between 1950 and 1960. It is a story of friendship, exile, class, faith, poverty, women's labour, men's pride, family duty, and the small stubborn beginnings of hope.

The final book in The Ashes Trilogy, SCATTERED follows Ashes and Gurriers in Gerard J. Hannan's deeply human chronicle of Limerick life: a trilogy of memory, survival, humour, sorrow, and the people history so often leaves behind.