An eminently poetic book Langrishe Go Down (Higgins's first novel) traces the fall of the Langrishes--a once wealthy highly respected Irish family--through the lives of their four daughters especially the youngest Imogen whose love affair with a self-centered German scholar resonates throughout the book. Their relationship told in lush erotic and occasionally melancholic prose comes to represent not only the invasion and decline of this insular family but the decline of Ireland and Western Europe as a whole in the years preceding World War II. In the tradition of great Irish writing Higgins's prose is a direct descendent from that of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett and nowhere else in his mastery of the language as evident as in Langrishe Go Down which the Irish Times applauded as "the best Irish novel since At Swim-Two-Birds and the novels of Beckett."
