SHIBBY MAGEE

Readers' Favorite International Book Awards Winner for Cultural FictionA vanished mother. A fractured family. A lifetime of choosing the wrong men.Eleven-year-old Shibby and her identical twin, Dorah, are abandoned by their Traveller/Mincéir mother, Vera Coffey, and left at the failing Gilligan's Bakery in Cloonharry under the formidable rule of their bigoted grandma, Nanna Magee. There, they live alongside Benny, their emotionally distant father; Alice Duffy, the housekeeper and surrogate mother; and Moochie de Barra, Benny's ever-present sidekick.At forty-five, Shibby leaves her sous-chef job in Dublin to live with her motley crew of a family on the island of Burren Droma-only to impulsively marry Traveller Povey O'Brien, with consequences far darker than she could have imagined. After finally finding her old, deranged mother, she makes a devastating discovery about Benny. Can Shibby break the pattern of destructive relationships that has followed her through life, or is she destined to repeat the same cycle of toxicity and ruin? Throughout, Shibby's life is colored by her sharp-edged sister Dorah, the ballast to her impulsive and romantically gullible self, and by Kitty Dooley, who embodies the fierce pride and harsh realities of Traveller life.Against the backdrops of the gossip-glued town of Cloonharry, Gilligan's Bakery, the caravans and campfires of Traveller life, and the windswept, craggy cliffs of Burren Droma, Shibby Magee reveals a family burdened by secrets, decades of sacrifice and shame, clerical abuse, and blackmail. Inherited trauma, identity, and the settled-Traveller divide run through a story steeped in Irish culture and place, where the dialogue crackles and the prose is alive with sensory detail-from fish and seaweed on the Atlantic air to the buttery scent of caraway seed cake.In the tradition of Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan, Trespasses by Louise Kennedy, The Queen of Dirt Island by Donal Ryan, and Brooklyn by Colm Tóibín, Shibby Magee is a warm yet incisive work of literary fiction about a woman shaped by loss, grief, and social prejudice as she struggles toward dignity, love, and self-possession.