Book review: Sorry for your Trouble is an unflinching look at our attitude to death

In a series of beautifully written vignettes Ann Marie Hourihane assembles a patchwork of stories portraying death in Ireland

Journalist and author Ann Marie Hourihane

Ann Marie Hourihane’s Sorry for your Trouble: The Irish Way of Death explores one of the most defining features of Irish life — our intimate, ritualised, and empathetic relationship with death. It is delicately written, wisely observed, and compassionately judged — and I found it almost impossible to get through the first chapter.

We all know we will, someday, die, but most of us tend to get through the day without giving the thought too much worry, sometimes even when the Angel of Death’s wings brush close to us, perhaps to better avoid becoming consumed by the “or not to be” half of Hamlet’s question.