Description
Book SynopsisDan 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.
Trade 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
