The Great Wall of Ballygall debuts this Summer 2026 with WIPF and STOCK.

Book cover for 'The Great Wall of Ballygall' by Seamus Boshell, featuring a stone wall in the foreground, green grass, and a partly cloudy sky background.

The novel follows Finn McCormack, who returns to his Irish hometown, Ballygall, from Boston to fulfill his late father’s two parting wishes—to be buried in the town graveyard and to reinstate a fourth-century wall around the town.

In the latter, he is seemingly aided by Hugh O’Neill, aka The Toll Queen, a car toll mogul. The ensuing chaos of the wall’s construction inflames the town, irrevocably altering the lives of its inhabitants, including that of Finn’s mother, Maeve. When she reveals a shocking secret from her past and then sells their home and family business, Finn’s sense of identity and community is shattered.

Meanwhile, Finn’s first love, Obee, returns from London to assist her Nigerian-born parents in The Battle for Ballygall. As they organize the town in opposition and attempt to heal themselves from the ruptures of their shared past, Finn and Obee must also decide whether they will ultimately stay in Ballygall, “a town they once left so well.”

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  • “This audacious, kaleidoscopic novel features an unforgettable cast of characters from Ireland, Nigeria and America, all of them determined to live at high velocity as they hurtle into vexed modernity. Antic yet sobering, hilarious yet soulful, the novel’s many moving parts ultimately cohere into an indelible group portrait sure to take up permanent residence in the reader’s grateful heart."

    —Maxine Rodburg, author of The Law of Return

  • “Fantastical, comical and richly plied with home truths about a changing but in some respects unchanged Ireland, grappling with its past and imbued with dark family secrets, The Great Wall of Ballygall is a deeply satirical, imaginative, wild-ride tale like no other novel you will have read.”

    —Dermot Bolger, author of The Journey Home

  • “Seamus Boshell's The Great Wall of Ballygal is pure music and magic, a reader's delight. My god, the writing! Lucid and lyrical, amusing and wise, not a word out of place. What do they call it? Perfect pitch? Well, if a book can have it, this one does. And what a story our charming narrator, Finn McCormack, tells us: comedic and insightful, tender and stoic. A tale of love and mad dreams, family and land. A glorious piece of literature and a profound work of the imagination. Bravo, Seamus Boshell!"

    —Jonathan Ames, author of Karma Doll