The Devil To Pay by Hugh Fitzgerald Ryan
Kilkenny, 1324. Alice Kyteler, outspoken daughter of a wealthy Flemish banker, has survived four husbands and is beset by the gossip and rivalry of a medieval Anglo-Norman town. Her beautiful maid is Petronilla, child of an itinerant shoemaker, her lover Sir Arnaud le Poer is seneschal and lord of south Leinster. Her nemesis is Richard de Ledrede, English Fransciscan, scholar, poet and now bishop of Ossory, determined to reassert clerical power and restore the dilapidated cathedral. To him Alice embodies the moral laxity of the age, her irreverence and knowlege of healing feeding his anger and obsession with witchcraft. Outside the city walls the native Irish are resurgent after 150 years of dispossession. In the streets of Kilkenny, crowds gather around the stake. In The Devil to Pay, HUGH RYAN tells the true story of Alice and Petronilla – portrayed against a backdrop of the struggles between Norman and Gael – bringing to life a remarkable tapestry of this pivotal era in Irish history.
Hugh Ryan is author of five previous novels, The Kybe (1980) Ancestral Voices, On Borrowed Ground, Reprisal and In the Shadow of the Ombu Tree (2005), set variously in Napoleonic Ireland and seventeenth-century Uruguay. He is a native of Skerries in north county Dublin, and is also an accomplished artist whose drawings form the headpieces to the chapters of this novel.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9781843511793 |
| ISBN 10 | 1843511797 |
| Title | The Devil To Pay |
| Author | Hugh Fitzgerald Ryan |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | The Lilliput Press Ltd |
| Year published | 2010-10-07 |
| Number of pages | 288 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |