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Product Description
After years of moving from place to place, a young family finds shelter in an isolated house in the Irish countryside. Their father is missing, Mum is a healer and B a formidable big sister. In his strange new territory, a wild little boy gives voice to his experience.
Jerry Drain, a local famer, is stealing hay from the barn, someone is making nasty phone calls to the house at night and darkness is gathering at the edges of their lives. With his ferocious imagination the boy will do everything in his power to protect his family. But Jerry will not go away and Mum seems to be falling under his spell. It will be a year of major wins and baffling defeats for the boy, as Jerry’s true nature insists on revealing itself.
Dark, funny, tender and raw, Frogs for Watchdogs thrums with the intensity of childhood. Above all, it is an ode to the blended family: the bewildering joy, wary safety and profound new bonds of love.
From The Irish Times - 07/01/25
Seán Farrell
Long-time literary editor Farrell has helped to shape many a manuscript, including the work of Nuala O'Connor Adrian Duncan, and others. Now he turns in his own, with Frogs for Watchdogs (New Island, February), a love letter to blended families set in an isolated house in the Irish countryside, and told from the perspective of an imaginative young boy.
Tell me a bit about yourself and how you became a writer
I was born and brought up in Ireland. I left for a long time and now I’m back. I have always read a lot and that’s what brought me to writing. The reader is so complicit in the creative process that there’s a very fine line between who’s doing what, so I see writing as a natural response to reading. I’ve taken so much joy from books, and I suppose I wanted to contribute something to that infinite sum.
How did Frogs for Watchdogs come about?
In desperation, I was trying to write something without using a narrator of any kind, whether first, second or third person. This led me to a few thousand words of very impressionistic, slightly unhinged prose where the scene was a huge imposition and there was very little feeling of control. Reading it made me feel like a small child at the mercy of the world around them; baffled, slightly frightened and full of wonder. That’s how it started.
You have a strong literary background. Your father, Antony, is a publisher. Your wife, Elske, is an author. You have been an editor for some years. Has this influenced your writing?
There’s a huge difference between what comes in as a manuscript and what goes out as a book, and understanding this has been an enormous advantage. One of the hardest things about being a writer is dealing with your insatiable ego and being involved in publishing has definitely helped me get this almost under control. Elske’s highly critical, unblinking eye has certainly made me a better writer, and it’s really beneficial to live with someone who understands this process.
