The River and Enoch O’Reilly

"This book is majestic and squalid at the same time, as if the Bible were actually about Elvis. The rhythms and music carry you like a baby on a raft on the river, but it's the precision of the words that cinches you."--Richard Hell, author of I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp

"A passionate dream of a book. Dazzling, but lucid--as though Flannery O'Connor had gone back to the Ireland of her forebears to write a novel."--Peter Behrens, author of The Law of Dreams

A small Irish town. A river flood. The return of a prodigal son. On the banks of the river Rua, when the rains have stopped and the waters receded, nine bodies are found. What took them to the river?

Enoch O'Reilly, a self-made preacher and Elvis impersonator claiming to be just returned to Ireland from America, launches a radio show Revival Hour. It enjoys a short but spectacular run, and its disastrous end forces Enoch back to the family home. There he finds clues to a mythic connection between the dead--this brotherhood of the flood--the natural rhythms of the earth, a secret language called riverish, and his lost father.

Conjuring together various traditions--gothic, Irish, Southern, musical, poetic, our deep connections to stories, to our homelands, and to nature--Peter Murphy establishes himself as one of Ireland's literary wonders.

"A wild and inventive butt-kicker, but also strangely tender, and the language is charged, vivid, luminous."--Kevin Barry, author of City of Bohane

"Murphy can write like an angel, [but] his gaze is mischievous."-- Irish Times