All The Beggars Riding

Novels

All The Beggars Riding book coverThe latest novel by Lucy Caldwell, “All the Beggars Riding”, published by Faber & Faber on February 7, was serialised on Book at Bedtime on BBC Radio 4 in March 2013, and chosen as both Irish Waterstone’s Book of the Month and Eason’s Bookclub Choice.

ABOUT THE BOOK

If wishes were horses, beggars would ride. (Trad.)

When Lara was twelve, and her younger brother Alfie eight, their father died in a helicopter crash. A prominent plastic surgeon, and Irishman, he had honed his skills on the bomb victims of the Troubles. But the family grew up used to him being absent: he only came to London for two weekends a month to work at the Harley Street Clinic, where he met their mother years before, and they only once went on a family holiday together, to Spain, where their mother cried and their father lost his temper and left early.

Because home, for their father, wasn’t Earls Court: it was Belfast, where he led his other life . . . Narrated by Lara, nearing forty and nursing her dying mother, All the Beggars Riding is the heartbreaking portrait of a woman confronting her past.

PRAISE FOR “ALL THE BEGGARS RIDING”

“…the heartbreaking portrait of a woman confronting and trying to make sense of her past. While the story is gripping and raw, the structure is the most interesting thing about Caldwell’s creation – the book itself the talisman that anchors us in actuality. It’s a novel about writing, about telling other people’s stories as well as our own. […] Lyrical, involving and in a way upsetting…” (read the review)
Irish Independent

“All the Beggars Riding” … is often moving, and it succeeds at allowing us a peek at other, believable, fully realised lives. (read the review)
The Guardian

Listen to Lucy discussing “All the Beggars Riding”