The Mangan Inheritance

James Mangan is adrift. He has lived in the shadow of his brilliant movie-star wife for years and now she has finally dispensed with him. Then he comes across an old daguerreotype of a man bearing a remarkable resemblance to him. Is it in fact a photograph of the great 19th-century Irish poet James Clarence Mangan, rumored to be Jamie's direct ancestor? Off to Ireland he goes, determined to discover his roots and to locate himself. What he finds is scarcely the heartwarming affirmation of identity he yearns for. On the contrary, the remaining members of the Mangan clan-derelict Eileen, reticent and vaguely hostile Dinny, drunken (and shrunken) Conor, and oversexed teenager Kathleen-are haunted by a strange and dark family history. Thrice shortlisted for the Booker prize, Brian Moore was an unparalleled spinner of captivating tales. This novel, vividly set in such disparate locations as New York City, Montreal, and rural Ireland, sweeps the reader into a story of literary suspense about the hidden legacies that shape our lives.

Brian Moore (1921–1999) was born into a large, devoutly Catholic family in Belfast, Northern Ireland. His father was a surgeon and lecturer, and his mother had been a nurse. Moore left Ireland during World War II and in 1948 moved to Canada, where he worked for the Montreal Gazette, married his first wife, and began to write potboilers under various pen names, as he would continue to do throughout the 1950s. The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1955, now available as an NYRB Classic), said to have been rejected by a dozen publishers, was the first book Moore published under his own name, and it was followed by nineteen subsequent novels written in a broad range of modes and styles, from the realistic to the historical to the quasi-fantastical, including The Luck of Ginger Coffey, An Answer from Limbo, The Emperor of Ice-Cream, I Am Mary Dunne, Catholics, Black Robe, and The Statement. Three novels—Lies of Silence, Color of Blood, and The Magician’s Wife—were short-listed for the Booker Prize, and The Great Victorian Collection won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. After adapting The Luck of Ginger Coffey for film in 1964, Moore moved to California to work on the script for Alfred Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain. He remained in Malibu for the rest of his life, remarrying there and teaching at UCLA for some fifteen years. Shortly before his death, Moore wrote, “There are those stateless wanderers who, finding the larger world into which they have stumbled vast, varied and exciting, become confused in their loyalties and lose their sense of home. I am one of those wanderers.”


Christopher Ricks teaches at Boston University and is a former president of the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers. From 2004 to 2009 he was Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford. His most recent book is True Friendship: Geoffrey Hill, Anthony Hecht, and Robert Lowell Under the Sign of Eliot and Pound.