Description

Dan Fogarty, an Irishman living in England, is looking after his sister Una, now seventy and suffering from dementia in a care home in Margate. From Dan’s anarchic account, we gradually piece together the story of the Fogarty family. How the parents are exiled from a small Irish village and end up living the hard immigrant life in England. How Dots, the mother, becomes a call girl in 1950s Soho. How a young Una finds herself living in a hippie squat haunted by vindictive ghosts in Kilburn in the early 1970s.

And, finally, how all that survives now of those sex-and-drug-soaked times are Una’s unspooling memories and Dan himself, whose role in the story becomes stranger and more sinister.

Poguemahone is a wild, shape-shifting epic from one of modern Ireland’s greatest writers. It is a wild free-verse monologue steeped in music and folklore, crammed with characters, both real and imagined, on a scale Patrick McCabe has never attempted before.

Publisher Review

'If you're looking for this century's Ulysses, look no further' Alex Preston, Observer 'McCabe may be right when he claims that Poguemahone is his best book: it is startlingly original, moving, funny, frightening and beautiful' Guardian 'Haunting strangeness and blazing originality' Times Literary Supplement 'Poguemahone is a stunning achievement ... profoundly affecting' David Keenan 'A blistering, brilliant ballad of mad tales from rural Ireland to London Town. The characters are electric, the narrative fuelled with a brilliant frenetic energy. McCabe is truly original' 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 'I warn you, like all good books, Poguemahone is a mind-altering drug' BBC 4 Front Row 'A moving saga of youth, age, and memory-by turns achingly poetic, knowingly philosophical, and bitterly funny' Kirkus Reviews '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 ... you'll remember its visit' New York Times 'A difficult reading experience, to be sure, but a rich one, too, with a skin-pricking ambience' Daily Mail 'Lively and ambitious in form, this admirably extends the range of McCabe's career-long examination of familial and childhood trauma' Publishers Weekly, US 'Here is a novelist and novel to celebrate in all their ribald, audacious, outrageous, and compelling brilliance' Paul Perry, Irish Sunday Independent 'Like listening to a friend confess their life story after one too many pints, Poguemahone is a rustic and irreverent atragedy of tormented souls and macabre humour' Noah Katz, Hot Press 'Poguemahone is a stunning novel, one of those exceedingly rare books that deserve to be described as a masterpiece' Locus Magazine