A Time Outworn by Val Mulkerns
ISBN 978-1-9162975-1-7 / 244 pages / €15.00 / Pub date: 14 Feb 2025
Valentine’s Day 2025 marks the centenary of the birth of Irish writer Val Mulkerns, and to celebrate 451 Editions brings out a special edition of her first novel, A Time Outworn. Published by Chatto and Windus in 1951, it’s the story of a young woman coming of age in post Second World War Ireland. 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.”
Carlo Gébler, in his foreword to the new edition, writes: “There are few if any equivalent Irish novels written and published in the period with the breadth of interests in all senses that are on display in A Time Outworn.”
The official publication date will be February 14 2025, to celebrate the centenary of Val Mulkerns’s birth on February 14 1925.
For more about the author, see: www.Valmulkerns.com