A Provincial Death

Lyrical and blackly comic, A Provincial Death is a startlingly original meditation on solitude and perseverance, the consolations of art and philosophy, and the capacity of human beings to endure catastrophe.

It is a hot, summer morning and Smyth, a struggling writer and academic, wakes to discover he is stranded alone on a rock in the Irish Sea. As he clings on in hope of salvation, he is assailed by broken memories and the failures of his past. Fragmented images of the previous day come to him: a mysterious research institute, a dead forest, a rickety boat captained by a gruff old fisherman, an eccentric academic named McGovern who believed that the Moon was about to crash into the Earth, destroying everything. Confused, weary and sore, and with the tide rising inexorably and strange sea creatures circling, Smyth tries to make sense of an arbitrary world in a desperate bid for survival.



Eoghan Smith is an Irish writer, critic and academic. He is the author of the novel The Failing Heart (Dedalus, 2018). He has also written a monograph on John Banville and was co-editor of a collection of essays on Irish suburban literary and visual cultures. He has contributed numerous essays, articles and reviews on literature and visual culture to a variety of academic and literary publications, including The Irish Times, Books Ireland, Dublin Review of Books, Irish University Review and the Irish Studies Review. He has taught English literature at universities and colleges in Dublin, Maynooth and Carlow since the mid-2000s. A Provincial Death is his second novel.