Hy Brasil

The old charts promised an island that lifts out of the western ocean once in seven years, and is gone before any keel can reach it. In Hy Brasil it lifts as a starship – and it has come for a poet. Ireland has mislaid its soul, and a commercial tide has run in on the land. Over a hillside cottage in Cork, a light descends from the sky, and the travelling bard Rory McDaid is lifted out of the world. Where he wakes is Hy Brasil – not the phantom island of Atlantic legend but a whole green planet beneath two moons and an unhurried sun, peopled by the Gaels that history let fall, left to live as Ireland was never allowed to. He is sent home altered, bearing a mission and a few uncanny gifts, to win back a country that has forgotten it was ever worth saving. What follows is a revolution waged in verses and communes and parliamentary seats, and answered in batons, bullets and fire – a rising that climbs, song by song, towards a reckoning no one can call. In the lineage of Flann O'Brien and the old immrama, the Irish voyage-tales that sent saints and chancers sailing off the edge of the known world – Hy Brasil is science fiction with a lament folded within its satire. Mischievous and mythic, by turns furious and tender – and certain, for all its devilment, that no country is ever quite lost while there's a song left to raise it. Cover Design by Megan Luddy Illustration by John Adams