Heat Not a Furnace

About the Book

"Revenge is mine: I shall repay," says the Lord, but that is not how the combatants in this story of a small seagirt Irish parish view the activities of the local curate. Revenge is theirs and they repay. Fr. Brendan dresses up as an Arab for fun, but it is no fun when Gobnait, the village's fiery gossip, falls off a ladder as a result. He opens up an American's coffin to find out why it is so light and brings the unforgiving weight of the widow down upon himself. He believes he has right on his side in championing wild creatures, but might is on the other side in the person of the sergeant, the head of the gunclub. His easy-going parish priest dies, and Fr. Brendan's new boss cuts ribbons out of the old pattern of doing things. He might have been able to fight off one or two of them, but not the firepower of all four of them together, which is what happens when a whale is stranded and a boy has a swim in a lake. The bishop has the last unhappy word.

But Heat Not A Furnace is not a sad book by any means. Linking arms in the plot at several points with the five people in the circle of revenge are wonderfully daft, lively and funny people: a seller of donkeys, a would-be Cistercian monk, an English eccentric, a shopkeeper who specialises in curses, a judge who prefers amateur drama to jurisprudence and many others. It is a portrayal of human relationships in rural Ireland, and very few people are in a better position to paint it than a man who was at once a priest and a writer.

About the Author

Jerome Kiely was born in Kinsale, Co. Cork. He taught for seventeen years in Carlow and Cork. Subsequently he ministered as a priest for a total of twenty-eight years. He won the West Cork Award for Literature in 1991. He has had four books published: The Griffin Songs (poems), Seven Year Island (fiction), Yesterdays of the Heart (poems), and Isle of the Blest (fiction).