Description This moving and disturbing novel confronts the experience of capital punishment and the effect it can have. After the death of their parents, twins Maud and Malachy clear their house; Maud finds the hidden secret of a granduncle who was hanged in the 1940s but doesn’t tell her brother, an unusual act because of their closeness. It is obvious to her that the man was innocent, and she becomes obsessed by the subject. She finds out what information she can, visits the jail where he was hanged and eventually is drawn to America because that is the only place which executes in the same language.
Much of her behaviour is untypical of her normal self, including her sexual forays, because her life has been pulled out from underneath her. She visits Death Row, and spends time with campaigners against capital punishment, some of whom have had family members murdered. All of this she does in secrecy as she still cannot bring herself to tell her brother. Although horrified at how her mother kept this secret from them she is now guarding it with the same vigour. In the meantime, in the real world, a man is falling in love with her, but she is too preoccupied to notice.
Skin of Dreams is also about the love between twins, and the loss of balance when that relationship is interrupted. Conlon subtly evokes the multiple worlds that compose the universe of Maud and Malachy, from a drowning village in Ireland to a sojourn in Tennessee, from drinking nights in Dublin to Death Row, from an unresolved past to the fearful resolution of judicial murder.
“Through two continents and two generations Evelyn Conlon traces the countenance of life and death and its so-called punishment, in a tale deftly told with revelation that startles with new insight.” Sam Reese Sheppard co-author of Mockery of Justice
Author Evelyn Conlon, born in County Monaghan in 1952, is an author of short stories, plays and critical essays; her acclaimed recent novel Skin Of Dreams was published in 2003, and her other novels include Stars inthe Daytime (1989), A Glassful of Letters (1998); her collections of short stories, Taking Scarlet as a Real Colour and Telling were published in 1993 and 2000.
