Nominated for the Booker Prize upon its release and winner of several awards, The Big Chapel is one of the great Irish novels. Part of the Liberties Irish Classics series, this novel depicts life in an Ireland subject to clerical power, an image which still resonates today. Basing his work upon a notorious clerical scandal of Victorian Ireland, Thomas Kilroy has written an anatomy of religious violence that remains relevant. In scenes that range from the private and lyrical to the panorama of a whole community in convulsion, he draws upon a deep knowledge of the history and folklore of nineteenth-century Ireland.