Launch of Tom Phelan’s Novel at Garden City Library

The paperback of Tom Phelan’s acclaimed novel Lies the Mushroom Pickers Told will be launched on Tuesday, March14, at 7:30 p.m. in the Garden City Public Library at 60

Seventh St., Garden City, NY.  Sponsored by the Irish Cultural Society, this event is free and open to all.

          John Walsh, editor of the Hedgemaster, will introduce Tom Phelan.  Tom will discuss the background of the novel as well as read a couple of selections.  Books will be available for signing.

          The online book review site Shelf Awareness says Lies the Mushroom Pickers Told is “a masterful portrait of Irish village life disguised as a murder mystery,” adding “Phelan finds humor and warmth in every poignant moment.” Publishers Weekly calls the book a “witty novel” and notes the “humor and the plentiful details of the farming lifestyle do much to enrich Phelan’s entertaining murder mystery.”

     Part human comedy and part mystery, Lies the Mushroom Pickers Told is a story about what holds a village together and what keeps people apart. When journalist Patrick Bracken returns to the Irish village where he was born, he knows the eyes of the townspeople are on him. He has come home to investigate two deaths that happened decades earlier, when he was a boy, deaths that were ruled accidental. But Patrick knows—and believes the whole town knows—they were murders.  

     Tom Phelan, a retired employee of the Garden City Public Schools, grew up on a small farm in Co. Laois in the Irish midlands. He had just turned fifty when his first novel, In the Season of the Daisies, was accepted for publication. One reviewer later wrote, “The most obvious question posed by a novelistic debut with as much resounding vigour as this is: Where has Mr. Phelan been?” Since then, Tom has written five more novels, Iscariot, Derrycloney, The Canal Bridge, Nailer, and Lies the Mushroom Pickers Told, as well as many memoir pieces for the Irish Echo newspaper.