Sorry for Your Trouble

The Irish do death differently. Funeral attendance is a solemn duty - but it can also be a social highlight, requiring sophisticated crowd control, creative parking solutions and a high-end sound system. In Sorry for Your Trouble, Ann Marie Hourihane holds up a mirror to the Irish way of death: the funny bits, the sad bits, and the hard-to-explain bits that tell us so much about who we are.

She follows the last weeks of a woman's life in hospice; she witnesses an embalming; she attends inquests; and she goes to funerals, of ordinary and extraordinary people all over the country - including that of her own father during a global pandemic. Shedding fresh, wise and witty light on a key pillar of Irish culture, it is one of the best books ever written about Irish life.