We’re excited to share with you the first titles on our 2019 list! Following the brilliant, best-selling success of Notes to Self by Emilie Pine comes another incredible essay collection and a very of-the-moment novel.
The Red Word by Sarah Henstra
Publishing: 21st March 2019 (Ireland and UK). Preorders available here or ask in your local bookshop.
The myths don’t have a clue what to do with women. They have nothing to say about us whatsoever. We need to build our own fucking mythology.
The battle of the sexes goes to college in this smart, thrilling debut by university English professor Sarah Henstra. University student Karen is swept up in back-to-school revelry and when she wakes up after a frat party lying on the lawn of Raghurst, a house of radical feminists, she gets a crash course in anti-frat activism on campus. GBC (‘Gang Bang Central’) is especially notorious, she learns, with several names featured on a list of date rapists compiled by female students.
Despite continuing to party at GBC and even dating one of the brothers, Karen is seduced by the intellectual stimulation and indomitable spirit of the Raghurst women. As Karen finds herself caught between two increasingly polarized camps, her feminist housemates believe they have hit on the perfect way to expose and bring down the fraternity as a symbol of rape culture… but the war between the houses will exact a terrible price.
The Red Word offers a lyrical yet eyes-wide-open account of the epic clash between fraternities’ time-honoured ‘right to party’ and young women’s demands for sexual safety and respect. With strains of The Marriage Plot and reminiscent of the work of Zadie Smith, Donna Tartt and Tom Wolfe, The Red Word arrives on the wings of furies.
‘An incisive campus novel . . . [The Red Word] raises essential questions surrounding class privilege, rape, and gendered power dynamics on campus.’ – Publishers Weekly
‘Henstra draws on Greek mythology to comment on contemporary issues—how assault can take on ambiguity and how the internalisation of rape culture convolutes gender politics, to the point where constructive conversation is nearly impossible.’ – New Yorker
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Minor Monuments by Ian Maleney
Publishing: 28th March 2019 (Ireland and UK). Preorders available here or ask in your local bookshop.
During the final two or three years of his life, I made many surreptitious recordings of John Joe as he sat by the fire. He was in the process of forgetting almost everything he’d ever known. He was fading out of the world and I wanted to record whatever it was he might say before it was too late…
Set around a small family farm on the edge of a bog, a few miles from the river Shannon, Minor Monuments is a collection of essays unfolding from the landscape of the Irish midlands. Taking in the physical and philosophical power of sound and music, and the effects of Alzheimer’s disease on a family, Ian Maleney questions the nature of home, memory, and the complex nature of belonging.
A thought-provoking and quietly devastating meditation on family and loss. With echoes of Tim Robinson, Tara Westover and John Berger, Minor Monuments is a beautiful and unique literary experience.
‘Minor Monuments is beautifully poised between the vivid recollection of experience and subtle reflections on the nature of memory itself. Ian Maleny writes with both a poetic serenity and a starting immediacy, a combination as rare as it is absorbing.’ – Fintan O’Toole
‘Minor Monuments is brilliant, pulsing with intellect and insight, with each observation composed so beautifully as to be deeply moving. This is the kind of book that changes its reader.’ – Lisa McInerney
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And finally, later in the year we’ll be sharing another title from our Recovered Voices series!
Tramp Press gratefully acknowledges the support of the Arts Council
