One of The Guardian’s “1,000 Books to Read Before You Die”

This underrated classic of contemporary Irish literature tells the “utterly transfixing” story of a lonely, poverty-stricken spinster in 1950s Belfast (The Boston Globe)

Judith Hearne is an unmarried woman of a certain age who has come down in society. She has few skills and is full of the prejudices and pieties of her genteel Belfast upbringing. But Judith has a secret life. And she is just one heartbreak away from revealing it to the world.

Hailed by Graham Greene, Thomas Flanagan, and Harper Lee alike, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne is an unflinching and deeply sympathetic portrait of a woman destroyed by self and circumstance. First published in 1955, it marked Brian Moore as a major figure in English literature (he would go on to be short-listed three times for the Booker Prize) and established him as an astute chronicler of the human soul.


“Seldom in modern fiction has any character been revealed so completely or been made to seem so poignantly real.” —The New York Times

“Set in Belfast in the early 1950s, Brian Moore’s The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne is not a kind book, no, but it is utterly transfixing . . . By the end of this truly brilliant, shocking novel, a story peopled by characters who make your skin crawl, the impossible has occurred: The reader both understands and feels compassion for a really awful woman.”
—Katherine A. Powers, The Boston Globe

“Remarkable . . . seldom in modern fiction has any character been revealed so completely or been made to seem so poignantly real.”
—The New York Times

“A powerful haunting story by a young Irish-Canadian who knows the meaning not only of loneliness, but that of compassion as well.”
—The New York Times
 
“Moore has absolute control over his narrative, and Judith Hearne’s descent is both excruciating and enthralling.”
—Anne Enright in O, The Oprah Magazine
 
“A penetrating, comic, tragic tale of a plain woman…It is a novel that occasionally sings with the lilt of the Irish greats.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
 
“Brian Moore [wrote] a superb first novel; The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne reads as freshly, and as heart-breakingly, today as it did when it first appeared in 1955.”
—John Banville
 
“The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne is, to my notion, everything a novel should be.”
—Harper Lee, The New York Times (1960)

“Each book of [Moore’s] is dangerous, unpredictable, and amusing. He treats the novel as a trainer treats a wild beast.”
—Graham Greene
 
“Moore is surely one of the most versatile and compelling novelists writing today.”
—Daily Telegraph

“I can’t think of another living male novelist who writes about women with such sympathy and understanding.”
—Times Literary Supplement

“A harrowing tour de force.”
—New Statesman and Nation