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Valentine's Day 2025 marks the centenary of the birth of Irish writer Val Mulkerns. To celebrate, 451 Editions brings out a special edition of her widely-acclaimed first novel, A Time Outworn. Originally published by Chatto and Windus in 1951, it's a coming of age story set in Ireland just after the Second World War. The anniversary edition features a foreword by Carlo Gebler, and an introduction drawn from Mulkerns's late 1940s diaries, by her daughter Maev Kennedy. The official publication date is February 14 2025, to celebrate the centenary of Val Mulkerns's birth on February 14 1925.
When Maeve Cusack falls short of the marks required for a university scholarship, her immediate prospects are unclear, complicated by her relationship with the bookish young Diarmuid. An intelligent and fiercely independent soul, Maeve's decisions are life-changing and highly untypical for the times. As much a portrait of post-war Irish society as of its distinctive heroine, it's a compelling fiction debut.
The New York Times praised it as "written in a cool and lovely prose". The Irish Times called it "a sensitive, intelligent first novel". Frank O'Connor, in a piece commissioned by Harpers Bazaar, wrote: "the prose is the sort that only a woman of genius can write, with every word like a dart at a target." In his foreword to the new edition, Carlo Gebler notes: "There are few if any Irish novels written and published in the period with the breadth of interests in all senses that are on display in A Time Outworn."
Val Mulkerns went on to write ten more books, worked as associate editor on The Bell, becoming a renowned voice in Irish literature, and among the first elected members of Aosdana. She was a journalist and often heard on RTE's Sunday Miscellany down the years. Her most recent titles were Memory and Desire and a memoir, Friends with the Enemy, launched by the author just weeks before her death in 2018. Her place in the Irish literary canon is celebrated in recent anthologies such as Reading The Future (Arlen House, 2018) and The Writer's Torch (Stinging Fly Press, 2023).
