The Fallen

This haunting and immersive book shines a light on the dark history of Ireland and the Magdalene Laundries.

Winner of the 2024 Royal Society of Literature Giles St Aubyn Award

Following independence in 1922, Ireland began to chase a dream: to become the perfect Catholic nation. But purity had a price. The women and girls who did not conform – the wayward, the poor, the disabled, the abused – were purged from the streets. The Magdalene Laundries represented the deep end of this regime of social control. Thousands were sent to these institutions; each was perceived to have fallen in some way. Once locked inside, their hair was shorn off, their names were erased and they were put to work. They washed, they scrubbed and they prayed, labouring in often indefinite captivity in an attempt to salvage their souls

Published to coincide with the thirtieth anniversary of the last Laundry’s closure, this is the forgotten story of Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries, told through the voices of those who endured them, the nuns who presided over them and the communities who lived alongside them. Drawing on survivors’ testimonies, it recovers the lives of women and girls on their harrowing journeys into, through and beyond the walls of these places of violence and secrecy.

This has remained one of the darkest and most misunderstood periods in recent history. In The Fallen, Louise Brangan dismantles long-held myths about what the Laundries were, who was sent there, and why. Unflinching and compassionate, she compels us not only to confront this shameful past, but to ask a deeper question: what do we choose to remember?