First published in 1973 and swiftly banned, John Broderick'sAn Apology for Roses returns as one of the most audacious portraits of provincial Ireland ever written. Set in a midlands town where respectability masks obsession, corruption and thwarted desire, the novel follows the intersecting lives of Marie Fogarty – clever, restless, dangerously sure of her own charm – and Father Tom Moran, the charismatic curate drawn into her orbit. Around them spin the claustrophobic rituals of family, gossip, religion and commerce: suffocating drawing‑rooms heated to excess, whispered devotions, clandestine meetings in lakeside chalets, nights of hunger, fear, exhilaration and betrayal.

Broderick exposes the hypocrisies of Irish Catholic life with wit, psychological acuity and a fearless eye for the erotic and the grotesque. A novel banned in its own time for its frankness, An Apology for Roses stands now as a darkly glittering masterpiece, bold, unsettling, and unforgettably alive.



John Broderick (1924–1989) was a novelist, critic and patron of the arts, celebrated for his unsparing portraits of Irish provincial life. The only child of a bakery family, he lived for periods in Paris, forming friendships with writers such as Julien Green, Gore Vidal and Truman Capote. His debut novel The Pilgrimage (1961) was banned in Ireland but appeared in the U.S. as The Chameleons, establishing his reputation. A pioneering writer of queer Irish lives, Broderick was contributor to The Irish Times, and was elected to the Irish Academy of Letters in 1968. He died in Bath in 1989, bequething his estate to support the arts of his home town of Athlone.