Lamb

A sensitive and compassionate novel exploring how people with the finest motives might find themselves reviled and outside the law.

“The tide had withdrawn almost completely, leaving the sand of the beach flat, except for where stones and other debris stood. Here the sand had been hollowed out on the seaward side in the shape of a plunging comet’s tail. The same pattern had formed round washed-up jelly-fish, with their delicate lilac traceries of innards. The Atlantic roared continuously on to the rocks at the point.
At four o’clock the two Brothers in buttoned black soutanes moved across the beach. They had come from the Home, set like a fortress on the cliff above the point. They walked the hard flat sand, talking.”

Copyright © Bernard MacLaverty. Reproduced by permission of the author c/o Rogers, Coleridge and White Ltd., 20 Powis Mews, London W11 1JN

On a promontory jutting out into the Atlantic wind stands the Home run by Brother Benedict, where boys are taught a little of God and a lot of fear. To Michael Lamb, one of the youngest brothers, the regime is without hope and when he inherits a small legacy he defies his elders and runs away, taking with him a twelve year old boy, Owen Kane.

Radio Eireann call it a kidnapping. For Michael the act is the beginning of Owen’s salvation. Posing as father and son, they concentrate on discovering the happiness that is so unfamiliar to them both. But as the outside world closes in around them - as time, money and opportunity run out - Michael finds himself moving towards a solution that is as uncompromising as it is inspired by love.

This could be construed as a metaphor for the ways in which people, during the Troubles, found that the formal and legal definitions of right and wrong don’t function for people in desperation. It is however, a story about a real scandal, which would shock Ireland when unfolded twenty years later, the abuse of children in loveless care homes run by religious order.