Review: "The Fallen" by Louise Brangan

The Fallen by Louise Brangan
Published May 2026 via Simon & Schuster
★★★★

In 1951, when the Laundries were at their height, for every one hundred thousand males, twenty-seven were in prison[...] While for every one hundred thousand females, seventy were in a Laundry. These were not peripheral: They were Ireland's main carceral institution. (loc. 179*)

The Fallen traces the history of Ireland's Magdalene Laundries, the last of which did not close until the mid-1990s. If you haven't heard of the Laundries, the short version is that they were just that—laundries—except run by nuns and staffed by women who had been consigned to the Laundries for infractions real and imagined.

Pregnancy outside marriage, yes, but mostly for being lively girls, abused and abandoned daughters, or because their families were pulled apart for not fitting the mold of what a family should be. (loc. 3247)

Brangan is careful to draw a distinction between the Laundries and the Mother and Baby Homes that also operated; there was certainly overlap between the women and girls who spent time in them and in the Laundries, but fundamentally the Mother and Baby Homes were there to hide women's pregnancies, and the Laundries were there to punish women and girls who had transgressed.

For Brigid, having played fast and loose with school rules, it was a life sentence. Adult men sentenced [for] murder in the twentieth century were rarely expected to serve more than seven years. Somehow, by the 1940s, the mildest transgression of girls and young women caused more outrage than the taking of a life. It was Brigid's mother who finally came to liberate her daughter. By that point, she was thirty-nine years old. (loc. 523)

I've read about the Laundries before, but everything I read adds something new. Brangan is determined to hold the nuns who ran the Laundries accountable in her words, but she's also clear that it's not just the nuns, or the church, who hold responsibility. The Laundries always reflected the mores of the society around them (loc. 2131). Take that and extend it a bit more broadly: the residential schools in Canada (and elsewhere); the troubled teen industry in the US; the way women have always been punished for stepping outside the lines.

I highlighted so many things in The Fallen—there's so much history wrapped up in how the Laundries came to be and how they evolved over time. At first I found the history a little dry, but then it became clear just how important it was to the overall picture. And then of course there are the personal stories, which Brangan pulls largely from existing testimonies, and the broader cultural context, and it's just...a lot of food for thought.

No one explained to Carmel what was happening. Nor did she ask. There were no rewards for curiosity in Catholic Ireland. (loc. 432)

Would recommend to anyone who has heard of the Magdalene Laundries and wants to know more, and also to people generally interested in the odder intersections of religion and women's history. And I'll leave you with this:

Some women at Sunday's Well were made to line up and repeat this after the nuns: "I am nobody, I am nobody, I am nobody." (loc. 1552)

*Quotes are from an ARC and may not be final.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.