Set in a future world devastated by the development of capitalism, King Goshawk, the first book in O'Duffy's Cuanduine trilogy, concerns the eponymous tyrant’s attempt to buy all of the wildflowers and songbirds in Ireland, and the attempt by a Dublin philosopher as well as a number of mythical heroes of Irish tradition to stop him.
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Originally published in 1926, King Goshawk and the Birds is the first installment of O’Duffy’s Cuanduine trilogy, which also included The Spacious Adventures of the Man in the Street (1928) and Asses in Clover (1933). Set in a future world devastated by the development of capitalism, King Goshawk concerns the eponymous tyrant’s attempt to buy all of the wildflowers and songbirds in Ireland, and the attempt by a Dublin philosopher as well as a number of mythical heroes of Irish tradition to stop him.
Eimar O’Duffy (1893-1935) was born in Dublin. Both a participant in and, beginning with the publication of his first novel in 1919, a critic of the Irish nationalist movement in the first decades of the twentieth century, O’Duffy devoted much of his prolific fiction writing to the satirizing of modern Irish culture.