Description

‘Wild, anarchic, and wonderfully head-spinning’ Neil Jordan, award-winning film director

A dark theatrical comedy about the vexed and violent relationship between Britain and Ireland, from twice Booker-shortlisted author Patrick McCabe.

It’s the summer of Brexit, and in a seedy hotel room on the South Coast of England, Chenevix Meredith finds his old comrade Henry Plumm murdered in the bathtub. Piecing together their shared history, Meredith looks back at the years they spent in Dublin half a century ago, running a theatrical agency and rubbing shoulders with actors and assassins alike in the swirling smoke of public houses. What their clients didn’t know, is that the flamboyant pair were undercover agents of the British state, posted to identify terrorist networks.

Goldengrove is a deeply immersive, satirical novel in which nothing is as it seems and no one is who they say they are. Steeped in film noir, classic crime and popular culture, McCabe blurs the lines between what’s real and what’s staged in this absurd game of cat and mouse.

‘Yet again Patrick McCabe summons the ghost of Flann O’Brien in this wild rollick of a novel . . . Wonderful, shape-shifting stuff’ Colum McCann, author of Apeirogon

‘Thunderously compelling and downright ecstatic . . . This is nothing less than the work of a genuine master, a must-read’ Billy O’Callaghan, author of Life Sentences

‘One hears Joyce and Beckett and Paul Muldoon in the background. Not because there is any borrowing, but because all alike draw from that same dazzling tradition of oral storytelling’ Mark Bowles, author of All My Precious Madness

Publisher Review

‘Wild, anarchic, and wonderfully head-spinning’ Neil Jordan, award-winning film director

‘Yet again Patrick McCabe summons the ghost of Flann O’Brien in this wild rollick of a novel. McCabe has his finger on all the perceived and unperceived witticisms of our times, and he manages to entice them into the treasury of our minds. Wonderful, shape-shifting stuff’ Colum McCann, author of Apeirogon

‘A new novel from the hugely gifted Patrick McCabe is always an event worthy of celebration, and it’s been a long time since I’ve read anything as thunderously compelling and downright ecstatic as Goldengrove. McCabe’s scintillating prose makes most of the rest seem like they’re standing still. This is nothing less than the work of a genuine master, a must-read’ Billy O’Callaghan, author of Life Sentences

‘Sure, one hears Joyce and Beckett and Paul Muldoon in the background. Not because there is any borrowing, but because all alike draw from that same dazzling tradition of oral storytelling. I loved it because, in part, this novel is, in love with language, its barely containable surplus of invention over prosaic truth’ Mark Bowles, author of All My Precious Madness

PRAISE FOR POGUEMAHONE

‘If you’re looking for this century’s Ulysses, look no further’ Alex Preston, Observer
‘I warn you, like all good books, Poguemahone is a mind-altering drug’ BBC 4 Front Row
‘Haunting strangeness and blazing originality’ Times Literary Supplement
‘Patrick McCabe’s hippie satire is like Flann O’Brien on drugs’ Sean O’Brien, Telegraph
‘Poguemahone, living up to its author’s reputation, is daring, studded with brilliance, raucous and exhausting’ New York Times
‘Poguemahone is a stunning achievement . . . profoundly affecting’ David Keenan
‘A blistering, brilliant ballad of mad tales from rural Ireland to London Town’ Elaine Feeney
‘A tremendous pitch-black multi-layered epic . . . one of the most original literary works in recent times. I bloody loved it’ Adelle Stripe