★Rights sold: Polish, Simplified Chinese.
★Anne Walsh Donnelly has been shortlisted for Hennessy/Irish Times New Irish Writing Literary Award, Fish International Prize and the RTE Radio One Frances Mac Manus competitions.
★Vibrant, expressive language gives insight to the life and thoughts of someone in longterm health care. A character rarely seen in fiction.
Extraordinary, form-bending prose: for readers of Max Porter, Patrick McCabe and David Toms.

‘I sit on the stone that will mark the bed of my bones. You’ll find the used-to-be-me, soon, flat body, washed up, wrinkly skin. No silly grin. You’ll say, What a waste of a life. Tut-tut sounds jump out. Dangle like worms from your crow’s mouth ...’

Meet ‘Daft Matt’, the Mayo man at the heart of this gorgeously written, form-bending tale. Matt, who has been told to get his head out of the clouds since he was a boy, has a hump the size of Nephin mountain from a lifetime of looking down. We first meet him wandering the streets of Castlebar in search of ‘Devil’s feet’ – the claw marks of the jackdaws who have spoken to him since he was a boy. He pretends not to hear the cruel remarks of those he passes, people who will never understand what’s going on in his head because they don’t take the trouble to ask.

In extraordinary prose, Walsh Donnelly imagines the inner life of Daft Matt, from the loss of his twin brother as a child, through the halcyon days of early manhood, to the shocking aftermath of a horse-riding accident that would leave him in care for another 30 years.

ANNE WALSH DONNELLY lives in Mayo in the west of Ireland. She is the author of The Woman With An Owl Tattoo, a poetic memoir of her coming out journey in her fifties and the poetry collection, Odd as F*ck. She has been shortlisted for the Fish International Prize and the Frances MacManus competitions for her fiction and for the Hennessy New Irish Writing Award and the International Poetry Book Awards for her poetry. Poetry Ireland in conjunction with Mayo Arts Office appointed her as Poet Laureate for the town of Belmullet in Co Mayo in 2021.