A slice of crazed, rural, Irish gothic: the tale of murder in a small Irish village in Donegal, Bogmail is a classic of modern Irish literature.

A rediscovered classic of Irish literature, this darkly comic tale, first published in 1978, tells of murder and its consequences. Set in a remote village in the northwest of Ireland, Roarty, a publican and former priest, kills his lecherous bartender and buries him in a bog. When Roarty begins to receive blackmail letters, matters quickly spiral out of his control. Alive with the loquacious brio of his pub's eccentric regulars, and full of the bleak beauty of the Donegal landscape, Patrick McGinley's rural gothic novel is a modern masterpiece.

There's a point in this book when you realise you are sinking into this scurrilously funny tale of murder and mania, and that you wouldn't have it any other way ... McGinley's use of language is a marvel ... There are snatches of Beckett in here, and oodles of what Joyce termed a "scrupulous meanness" in drawing the characters' Irish Examiner.