The Fallen by Louise Brangan review – an enraging account of Ireland’s Magdalene laundries

The horrifying story of the Catholic-run institutions that incarcerated thousands of women and girls Many readers, and surely most Irish readers, will finish this book in a state of white-knuckled rage, mingled with sorrow and at least a pang of guilt. It is a detailed, thoroughgoing and appalling account of the Magdalene laundries, the most famous, and most infamous, among Ireland’s extended and varied landscape of penal or correctional institutions, which operated for most of the 20th centu...

By John Banville