Winterwood won the Irish Novel of the Year 2007 and was nominated for the 2008 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award Breakfast on Pluto and The Butcher Boy were both shortlisted for the Booker Prize Breakfast on Pluto and The Butcher Boy were both made into acclaimed films by Neil Jordan
Patrick McCabe was born in Clones, Co Monaghan, Ireland, in 1955. His novels include Carn; The Dead School; The Butcher Boy, winner of the Irish Times/Aer Lingus Literature Prize, shortlisted for the 1992 Booker Prize and made into a highly acclaimed film directed by Neil Jordan; Breakfast On Pluto, also shortlisted for the Booker Prize; and Winterwood, winner of the Irish Novel of the Year 2007. He lives in Clones.
'McCabe has made unreliable narrators his stock-in-trade, and they do not come much more unreliable than sexagenarian boulevardier Chris J. McCool ...Throw in a dashing Nigerian and small-town Ireland at its most incestuous and bigoted, and you have a typical McCabe cocktail: black comedy delivered with tongue-in-cheek effervescence' Mail on Sunday 'Few people can make an unreliable narrator and a vigorously scrambled time-scheme as compelling as McCabe can, and his story telling powers are in full flow in The Holy City' Guardian 'A hall of mirrors ... [McCool's] intensifying madness, religious and sexual confusion and mental deterioration are painful to read and cleverly drawn; real and imagined events are veiled with McCabe's engaging lyricism' The Times 'A masterly handling of the macabre ... sometimes that numb surface generates a brilliantly deadpan meeting of the eerie and the comic' Daily Telegraph
'McCabe has made unreliable narrators his stock-in-trade, and they do not come much more unreliable than sexagenarian boulevardier Chris J. McCool ...Throw in a dashing Nigerian and small-town Ireland at its most incestuous and bigoted, and you have a typical McCabe cocktail: black comedy delivered with tongue-in-cheek effervescence' Mail on Sunday 'Few people can make an unreliable narrator and a vigorously scrambled time-scheme as compelling as McCabe can, and his story telling powers are in full flow in The Holy City' Guardian 'A hall of mirrors ... [McCool's] intensifying madness, religious and sexual confusion and mental deterioration are painful to read and cleverly drawn; real and imagined events are veiled with McCabe's engaging lyricism' The Times 'A masterly handling of the macabre ... sometimes that numb surface generates a brilliantly deadpan meeting of the eerie and the comic' Daily Telegraph
McCabe (Winterwood) delivers a claustrophobic indictment of failed peace and love, as seen through the eyes of a nut job Irish baby boomer. C.J. "Pops" McCool, the illegitimate son of a wealthy, married housewife, is raised by a surrogate mother in the "Nook," a plot of land buried deep within his birth mother's estate. However, when candy-striped blazers and the Kinks enter his world, McCool dives headlong into the swinging lifestyle, developing an unhealthy attachment to a Nigerian teenager and dating an older woman. As McCool's cultural obsessions grow out of control, he acts on a taboo impulse and starts a chain of events that leads to his institutionalization. Nearly 40 years later, living with a doting wife, McCool attempts to reconcile his youth with his supposedly cured present state. At turns irate, mystified and nostalgic, McCool's reminiscences stand as a haunting rejoinder to his youth's groovy promise. McCabe's dynamic and flawed antihero is a creepy delight, the perfect guide to some very dark material. (Jan.) Copyright 2008 Reed Business Information.
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