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Lisa McInerney's debut novel arrives with the swagger of a writer who knows exactly what she wants to do and possesses the linguistic firepower to pull it off. Set in post-crash Cork, The Glorious Heresies spins out from a single bungled killing - a fifty-nine-year-old woman named Maureen brains an intruder with a religious relic in her flat - and tracks the aftershocks through the lives of four people clinging to the underside of Irish society. Her gangster son Jimmy, tasked with covering it all up, drags in a broken alcoholic neighbour, Tony, whose fifteen-year-old son Ryan is already drifting from promising musician into small-time drug dealing. Georgie, a sex worker half-heartedly trying to find God, completes the tangle. What could have been a grim procession of misery is something stranger and more alive: a blackly funny, morally restless novel about shame, salvation and the long shadow of the Catholic Church on a country still working out what comes next.

The language is the thing that hits you first. McInerney writes in a Cork vernacular so muscular and musical it practically levitates off the page, studded with filth, slang, and similes that arrive at full sprint. Lines that would sound show-offy in a lesser writer land here as proper jokes or small acts of observation. Her eye for character is equally sharp. Maureen is the book's gleaming jewel - a late-in-life firebrand whose scathing takedowns of Irish religious hypocrisy are worth the cover price alone - and Ryan's doomed teenage romance with Karine carries a tenderness that sneaks up on you amid all the carnage. Georgie, too, is drawn with real compassion rather than pity. The novel's furious anger at a church that abandoned the people it was meant to shelter is not editorial but structural, threaded through every choice these characters have left to make.

It is not flawless. The plot occasionally stalls and then seems to combust itself back into motion, as though fresh catastrophe were being deployed to keep the engine running. Coincidences pile up, two flashbacks sit awkwardly, and the resolution ties up a fraction too neatly for a book that otherwise refuses easy comfort. Ryan, despite being the emotional centre, carries more contradictions than the character can quite absorb, shifting between doomed innocent and rising criminal without always reconciling the two. The prose, for all its brilliance, is sometimes too generous with itself, sending metaphors ricocheting across paragraphs when restraint would have landed harder.

None of this finally matters much. The Glorious Heresies is a big, brassy, sexy beast of a book, populated by deeply flawed people who keep fumbling toward something like dignity and occasionally reaching it. It is funny in the way only genuinely bleak books can be funny, and moving in ways its subject matter has no business being. A remarkable debut, and a novel that lingers long after the last page.