April 20th
7pm
For fans of Shuggie Bain and A Little Life, Juno Loves Legs is the epic and heartbreaking story of a young friendship set in working-class Dublin in the 1980s.
"Juno Loves Legs is a gorgeous, devastating ode to the sustaining power of friendship, as well as exquisitely atmospheric portrait of a city. A great Dublin novel. A great novel, period." —Dan Sheehan, Literary Hub, A Most Anticipated Book of the Year
Juno Loves Legs is the story of two teens labeled as delinquents. Juno and "Legs" grow up on the same housing estate in Dublin, where spirited, intelligent Juno is ostracized for her poverty and Legs is persecuted for his sexuality; they find safety only in each other.
Set against the backdrop of Dublin in the 1980s, a place of political, social and religious change, the friends yearn for an unbound life and together they begin to fight to take up the space of who they truly are. As their defiance reverberates through their lives, the children are further alienated from their surrounding society through acts of bravery and cowardice, both their own and others’. Finding themselves as outsiders, they are feared, coveted and watched, but rarely truly seen.
Told through the eyes of Juno, we see the pair begin to navigate the political and oftentimes confusing adult world with honesty and intuition. A country emerging from a dark Catholicism into the wider world of possibilities. Who is invited into modernity and gentrification and who is left behind?
Caught between the rich depth of her intellect and the harsh reality of her life, we follow Juno as she begins to understand how divergent a life lived and a life thought can be.
Juno Loves Legs shows the frustration of feeling trapped in a life that is not yours and the ability of friendship to lift us out of our experiences and into a truer version of ourselves. It is a novel that reminds us that kindness, bravery, and love appear in places where they are not always expected and in forms not usually recognised, but with a potency that cannot be ignored.
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Karl Geary was born in Dublin and moved to New York’s East Village at the age of sixteen. His debut novel, Montpelier Parade, was short-listed for numerous awards, including the Desmond Elliott Prize, the Costa First Novel Award, and France's prestigious Prix Femina, and was named an Irish Times Book of the Year. He lives in Glasgow.
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Paul Rowley is an Irish filmmaker based in Brooklyn, New York. For over twenty years he has been making work that combines elements of documentary, video art, and fiction into immersive and often politically engaged films. His work has screened at the Centre Pompidou, Berlin Film Festival, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Irish Film Institute, SXSW and many film festivals internationally. Past feature documentaries include Seaview, a film made in collaboration with asylum seekers in the former Butlin’s holiday camp in Mosney, Ireland, and The Red Tree which tells the little-known story of Mussolini’s prison island for gay men. He has twice been nominated for Irish Films and Television Awards and was the recipient of the Irish Museum of Modern Art’s Glen Dimplex Award. His upcoming film Gays Against Guns follows a radical direct action group of LGBTQ+ activists as they work to end the American gun violence epidemic.
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