The Burning of Brinseley MacNamara

The Valley of the Squinting Windows (1918), Brinsley MacNamara's first published novel, so enraged the Westmeath community in which he lived that the book was publicly burned, its author humiliated and his father, the local schoolteacher, boycotted and driven into exile. MacNamara (1890-1963) was never to live in the Irish midlands again but wrote about it for the rest of his days in an outpouring...