A necessary and urgent visit to one of society’s great evils

A short but exhausting, frustrating, and in some ways enlightening read

Anakana Schofield has penned an empathetic account of a man who is, at once, warped and tortured

Fiction; Martin John; By Anakana Schofield & Other Stories Press, €12.85

As already evidenced in works like Russell Banks’s Lost Memory of Skin and Alissa Nutting’s Tampa, the story of a sex offender is a rich literary seam to mine. We are by turns fascinated and disgusted by these modern-day societal lepers, and by the writers who choose to go toe-to-toe with them.

Irish-born Anakana Schofield, now living in Canada and amassing a ...