Shambles Corner – Edward Toman

First published in 1993 and now available as an ebook.Hilarious and poignant, Shambles Corner is a novel that takes an uncompromising look at the elaborate ideologies and rituals of religious bigotry in Ulster.Frank Feely is a young innocent growing up in the hills of Armagh. From his father Joe he learns about the goings-on in the city, where the two sides confront each other across the Shambles and the fortunes of an extraordinary cast of characters ebb and flow, until news comes from the far west of a discovery that will change them all.Though set in modern times, Shambles Corner portrays a quasi-medieval world where materialism and magic run hand in hand. A world of ghettos and pilgrimages and banishments, peppered with wit and violence, inhabited by farmers and smugglers, boatmen and butchers, clerics and publicans, gunmen, fugitives, patriots and saints; a world whose morals and mores are policed by a sinister band of fanatical, female vigilantes. A world anticipating the future and invoking the past as it lurches towards the millennium.