A Belfast-born actress with experience in film, theater, and television, Forbes draws from her own professional and personal background to imbue her protagonist with authentic energy and humanity . . . deftly explor[ing] the private and public struggles of this particular Catholic family with vivid, poetic language. . . . By the end, the truth—the brutal and the beautiful—rises to the surface of this eloquent novel.
Ghost Moth
During the hot Irish summer of 1969, tensions rise in Belfast where Katherine, a former actress, and George, a firefighter, struggle to keep buried secrets from destroying their marriage. In this emotionally acute debut novel, Michèle Forbes immerses the reader in a colorful tapestry of life. Throughout the book’s carefully woven story the bonds of family are tested and forgiveness is made possible through two parents’ indomitable love for their children.
An exploration of memory, childhood, illicit love, and loss, Ghost Moth portrays ordinary experiences as portals to rich internal landscapes: a summer fair held by children in a back yard garden exposes the pangs and confusion of a first crush; an amateur theatre production of Bizet’s Carmen hires a lonely tailor who puts so much careful attention into the creation of a costume for his lover that it’s as if his desire for her can be seen sewn into the fabric. All the while, Northern Ireland moves to the brink of civil war. As Catholic Republicans and Protestant Loyalists clash during the “Troubles,” the lines between private anguish and public outrage disintegrate in this exceptional tale about a family—and a country—seeking freedom from ghosts of the past.
Irish Book Awards Shortlist
Library Journal Best Indie Fiction of the Year
Chatelaine magazine Book Club selection
Concord Monitor/Concord Insider Book of the Week
Publishers Weekly Best Summer Book Staff Pick
Brooklyn Book Festival Most Impressive Debut Novelist
Late Night Library Battle of the Books Final Four
City Lights Bookstore Staff Pick
Politics & Prose Bookstore Staff Pick
Ebook
- ISBN
- 9781934137611
Paperback
- ISBN
- 9781934137604
During her US tour, Michèle Forbes discussed Ghost Moth and the writing life with authors Roxana Robinson, Caroline Leavitt, John Searles, Bernice L. McFadden,and Elizabeth Nunez at a special Strand bookstore event, sponsored by the Women’s National Book Association. Watch the video here.
In selecting Ghost Moth for the Publishers Weekly “Best Summer Books” issue, co-editorial director Michael Coffey explains how “this amazingly assured first novel” found its home at BLP: “After receiving rejections from 38 publishers in the U.K. and Ireland, Forbes (an actress) got a tip from Paul Harding of Tinkers fame at the Dublin Writers’ Festival, which led her to send the manuscript to Bellevue.”
Irish author Michèle Forbes had trouble finding a publisher for her debut novel, Ghost Moth, until she sent her manuscript to Bellevue Literary Press. Read her story in the Irish Times and the find out more about its very happy ending in The Bookseller.
Born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, Michèle Forbes is an award-winning theater, television, and film actress who has toured worldwide with The Great Hunger and Dancing at Lughnasa. She studied literature at Trinity College, Dublin and has worked as a literary reviewer for the Irish Times. Her short stories have received both the Bryan MacMahon and the Michael McLaverty Awards. She lives near Dalkey, Dublin with her husband and two children. Ghost Moth is her first novel.
visit author page »Praise for Ghost Moth
Readers will revel in the skillful writing . . . complex plot . . . strong characterization . . . lyrical descriptions . . . Genre fans (Irish-history buffs, family-story readers, historical-fiction enthusiasts) will enjoy this novel, while its stylistic richness and narrative intricacy will also please readers of literary fiction. Highly recommended.
Forbes debuts a gemlike novel. Rare and luminescent, her storytelling is deliberate in its unfolding. Readers will marvel at the subtle embroidering of folk stories such as the Selkie wife and Briar Rose into the Bedfords’s narrative. Fans of Anne Enright’s fiction will admire a similar brilliance in this work.
Personal and political turmoil erupt in the life of Irish housewife Katherine Bedford during the summer of 1969 in Forbes’s powerful debut novel. . . . Through her richly imagined characters, Forbes depicts a fully human and flawed relationship between two people with their own desires, memories, and secrets.
What makes Ghost Moth such a compelling read is the individual characters . . . As literary heroines go, Katherine is quite ordinary; nonetheless, Forbes paints a vast and colorful tapestry of a life that is anything but. Ghost Moth is more than just a story of a woman torn between two men; it is a novel that anyone who has ever experienced a crisis of faith can identify with.
Though this is Forbes’ first novel, Katherine is a sophisticatedly created heroine, perfect in her flaws, compelling in her lies, beautiful in her tragedy. . . . ‘What does love feel like?’ Katherine’s oldest daughter, Maureen asks. ‘Floating and burning,’ her mother replies. And like love, Forbes’ prose floats with captured emotion and burns with its vivid imagery.
Ghost Moth is a beautifully deceptive book. It feels light, ethereal, gentle and precious. Yet it deals with such momentous issues as religious intolerance, infidelity, illness, death. . . . Revelations come not with a bang, but with a whisper, mirroring life as it truly is rather than the drama we try to pull from it.
Forbes’ prose is like a masterful painting you see at a museum: at first glance you may respond to the beauty, the color and texture, composition and themes. But the longer you look the more you realize the artwork is powerful, it’s both contained and expansive, incredible in and of itself, but also able to impact the way you feel . . . A terrific novel.
Clever, unpredictable, beautifully written and crafted—Ghost Moth stayed with me for a long time after I’d finished reading the final, sad, wonderful page.
— Roddy Doyle, Booker Prize-winning author of Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha and The Commitments
Ghost Moth is an impressive debut by a writer who is not afraid to address the so-called ordinary lives of real human beings. We shall be hearing a great deal more from Michèle Forbes.
— John Banville, Booker Prize-winning author of The Sea and Ancient Light
This slow burning tale is both guileless and deeply—sometimes erotically—charged. The writing soaks up the world, and thrills to the beauty of it. Children, bees, milk, the sea, all are wonderfully rendered and alive on the page. Katherine Bedford—so ordinary and so passionate—is a heroine to treasure.
— Anne Enright, Booker Prize-winning author of The Gathering and The Forgotten Waltz
A bountiful river of lovely images, fresh and perfect, a triumphant story both familiar and strange. A stellar debut.
— Sebastian Barry, Booker Prize-nominated author of The Secret Scripture and On Canaan’s Side
A haunting story about love, yearning and loss that never fails to surprise or move the reader. This is a most impressive debut from a supremely talented writer.
— Christine Dwyer Hickey, author of Last Train from Liguria and Tatty
A commanding debut, packed with genuine characters, telling its story with powerful control. Ghost Moth is a beautiful book, by a wonderful writer.
— Frank McGuinness, twice Tony Award-nominated playwright of the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award-winning play Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me