Shortlisted for the Children’s Books Ireland Award 2020
Shortlisted for the Irish Book Awards 2019
Dept51 @ Easons Teen & Young Adult Book of the Year
A YALSA Best Fiction for Young Adults 2020 title
An ALA Rainbow Book Selection title
This is beautiful, visceral writing, a primal scream that serves as a damning indictment of the way women have been treated in this country.
– Louise O’Neill
Beautiful and visceral, All the Bad Apples is for readers who’ve had enough of shame and secrets. This essential book unearths what patriarchy wants to keep buried, dragging truth into the light with a fierce belief in the power of telling stories. Moira Fowley-Doyle has crafted a tale devastating in its universality.
-Joy McCullough, author of Blood Water Paint
Moira’s books are always something so special, but this one even more so than usual; so tender and fierce, full of blessings and curses, like a fiery avenging angel of a book. I loved how it tied together family and tragedy and history and destiny, winding through generations and knitting everyone together, and, most of all, how it kept the crimes committed against young women who stray from the path at its heart, and exposed them to the sky, turning judgement on the judges, exposing the hypocrisy of it all. I am in absolute awe of it.
–Melinda Salisbury, author of The Sin Eater’s Daughter
With a memorable blend of magic and reality, Fowley-Doyle (The Accident Season) tells a harrowing and ultimately empowering story as her characters reject the shame and stigma others try to impose on them.
– Horn Book
This lyrical, furious examination of victimised, silenced Irish women is compelling.
– The Guardian
It’s a gorgeous set-up for a magical realist dive into today’s teenagers confronting the hideous heritage of this country (…) This is a book to hold tightly to your chest.
– The Irish Times
There is something really precious about Moïra Fowley-Doyle’s All the Bad Apples: it’s the flowing narrative, or the beautiful, all-encompassing story it tells. It’s its women, its girls, its outsiders, its “bad apples”. It’s its confrontation of Ireland’s history. All of the above.
– The Book Smugglers
An astonishingly potent offering to women who break the mold.
– Booklist (starred review)
Told in a mix of letters, family stories, and narrative, this devastating novel manages to find hope for the future while sending pointed messages that are as vital as they are timely.
– Publishers Weekly
The echo of past trauma is hauntingly underscored by the invocation of the banshee scream, and the book has a simmering, authentically righteous fury.
– BCCB
An emotional journey through Ireland’s unspoken history. . . . Simultaneously enjoyable and difficult to read, Fowley-Doyle’s fast-paced, evocative novel introduces . . . unsettling truths, both historical and contemporary, such as incest, rape, abortion, child labor, and violence against women and those in the LGBTQ community. These topics, however, are important and are handled with great care . . . Recommended for readers who enjoy realistic and historical fiction.
– School Library Journal
This novel will sink its teeth into you and you won’t want it to let go.
– Lambda Literary
Intense social motivation sits easily alongside loveable characters and a compelling narrative . . . All The Bad Apples isn’t just about evil doings, it’s about silence too, and the complicity of that silence – the further evil done by knowing and not saying . . . The most emotive moment comes when the characters, previously almost crushed by their fate, realise the enormous power of telling their stories, loudly and without fear.
– Irish Independent
Moïra Fowley 