Goldengrove by Patrick Mccabe

Goldengrove by Patrick Mccabe

A vicious black comedy from Patrick McCabe, the author of>Poguemahone, about the vexed and violent relationship between Britain and Ireland, two countries divided by a common history.

It's the summer of Brexit, and in a seedy hotel bedroom in Woolsey Bay, we find the recently retired Chenevix Meredith looking back on his years running a theatrical agency in Dublin in the 1960s with flamboyant fellow Brit, Henry Plumm. What their clients don't know, is that both men are active agents of the British state posted to Dublin to identify and infiltrate terrorist networks.

But that unpleasantness was almost half century ago. Surely history has forgotten them? When Plumm is found floating in a bathtub with his skull stoved in, Meredith realises that as far as Irish history is concerned, the past is never dead: as a wise man once observed, it's not even past.

'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 novelMcCabe 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

Patrick McCabe was born in Clones, County Monaghan. He is the author of The Butcher Boy, which won the Irish Times Irish Literature Prize for Fiction, The Dead School, Breakfast on Pluto, Winterwood and others. The Butcher Boy and Breakfast on Pluto were both shortlisted for the Booker Prize and adapted into feature films by Neil Jordan. Winterwood was named the 2007 Hughes & Hughes/Irish Independent Irish Novel of the Year. He now lives in Monaghan.