A Provincial Death

It is a hot, summer morning and Smyth, a struggling writer and academic, wakes to discover he is stranded alone on a rock in the Irish Sea. As he clings on in hope of salvation, he is assailed by broken memories and the failures of his past. Fragmented images of the previous day come to him: a mysterious research institute, a dead forest, a rickety boat captained by a gruff old fisherman, an eccentric academic named McGovern who believed that the Moon was about to crash into the Earth, destroying everything. Confused, weary and sore, and with the tide rising inexorably and strange sea creatures circling, Smyth tries to make sense of an arbitrary world in a desperate bid for survival. Lyrical and blackly comic, A Provincial Death is a startlingly original meditation on solitude and perseverance, the consolations of art and philosophy, and the capacity of human beings to endure catastrophe.

Praise for A Provincial Death

‘A dark, courageous novel for those who like their fiction experimental, no chaser. Smyth, too prone to be called a protagonist, is an academic who awakens one day to find himself injured and stranded on a rock in the Irish Sea. What follows is an ineffable fragmentary flow of consciousness and memory unspooled by switches in narrative voice, with lots of literary references (Arendt, Beckett, Rilke, etc), and Camus-flavoured discourses as Smyth clings to his rock, rather than roll one uphill. Smith is a fine writer, imbued with the gothic and metaphysical. This is his second book following The Failing Heart, and he possesses a lapidary style; a ruminative voice that echoes in the mind. He fables with a flourish on life’s futility, and our failings.' - NJ McGarrigle, The Irish Times

[Smith's] descriptive writing is breathtaking, on the level of the image, the sentence, the page. The book teems with life. […] Here is the poet's lyric gift (a cloud —"those tresses of cirrus are thinning out") and here are three-page, Banville-like descriptive arias, consisting of long, comma-filled sentences of enormous power, depicting Smyth's flight across the Wexford countryside, the last moments of a herring, and everything in between […] [A Provincial Death] is seriously Irish — and Irishly serious: the ridiculousness of Smyth’s predicament doesn’t stop its being terrifying. For all its formal adventurousness and linguistic playfulness, this is a novel "about" what makes us human, about why we should cling on to the rock instead of loosening our grip. Smyth realizes that "his mind is coextensive with the world," that the firmament above his island and the multitudinous seas around it are unceasingly dying and being born, but that his end, however lonely and unremarked, means something. - Andrew Deacon, Irish Literary Supplement

‘A Provincial Death is a beautifully composed novel that will leave you in the pleasurable ache of unanswerable questions, and it is true that the unanswerable questions are the most important ones to ask.' - Maria O’Brien, writing.ie

‘Smith uses the novel as a vehicle to exercise concerns both philosophical, ecological and deeply personal. These concerns, and the form in which they’re explored […] test the limits of what can be defined as a novel. And yet, the interplay between the author, the narrator and the protagonist, and the interrogation of narrative form and capacity here makes the book a truly interesting and genuinely experimental foray into Irish writing.' - Stephen Reid, Books Ireland

Published by Dedalus Books (2022)