The Bodley Head triumphs in nine-way auction for Louise Brangan’s debut non-fiction book  

The Bodley Head has snapped up Louise Brangan’s The Fallen after a nine-way auction.

Taking readers inside Ireland’s Magdalene laundries, The Fallen details the lives of women forcibly incarcerated there throughout the 20th Century. The publisher described it as “a harrowing but deeply compelling history, filled with first-hand testimony".

Alice Skinner, commissioning editor, acquired UK and Commonwealth rights from Matt Turner at RCW. The Bodley Head will publish in 2026. North American rights were sold to Emily Simonson at S&S at auction.

Skinner said: “For thousands of women in Ireland, the Magdalene laundries were a permanent place of confinement and erasure, from which there was no return. Louise has thoughtfully recovered their voices, I’m very proud indeed to be publishing such a haunting and urgent book, that interrogates the culture of shame in Ireland, and tells the full story, for the first time, of one of the largest penal systems in the 20th-Century English-speaking world.”

Brangan added: “All societies, even the most stable, can slip into extreme intolerance. In that way, Ireland was no exception in the 20th Century. But the scale of Ireland’s carceral system sets it apart. And in a regime distinguished by its excessive inhumanity, the Magdalene laundries were its deep end. How could this happen? And why? These are questions which I have so long yearned for answers, and I don’t think I am alone in that need for clarity, as this generation has been forced to grapple with the legacies of the laundries. This book is my attempt to make sense of this past in the hope that we don’t repeat these mistakes in the future. I can think of no better people to bring this book into the world than The Bodley Head and Simon & Schuster, who know how to handle histories that speak to the world we find ourselves in today.”

Dr Louise Brangan is chancellor’s fellow at the School of Social Work and Social Policy at University of Strathclyde. She completed her PhD in Criminology at the University of Edinburgh in 2018, where she was visiting Fulbright scholar at the Center for the Study of Law and Society at UC Berkeley. Her academic book, The Politics of Punishment, was published by Routledge in 2021.