What if James Joyce and his great love had split up at the start? Morrissy’s reimagining is a stylistic tour de force that the man himself would have surely admired
On one level, all novels are a collection of facts, real and invented. In Penelope Unbound, Mary Morrissy takes a real person, Nora Barnacle, wife of James Joyce, and gives her a life that diverts from the one she lived. Given Nora’s iconic status, I’d say it took considerable courage and chutzpah to carry this novel off.