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Picador
May 2024
On Sale: May 14, 2024
288 pages
ISBN: 1250335787
EAN: 9781250335784
Kindle: B0BBC9ZBHF
Trade Paperback / e-Book
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Hardcover (May 2023)
Fiction | Literature and Fiction
While growing up in West Belfast, Sean does everything he’s supposed to do. He works hard, he studies, and heβmostlyβstays out of trouble. The thirty-year conflict is over, he’s told, and his future is lit with promise.
But when Sean returns home from university, he finds much of the sameβthe same friends doing the same gear in the same clubs; the same lost brothers and mad fathers; the same closed doors; the same silences. There are no jobs, Sean’s degree isn’t worth the paper it’s written on, and no one will give him the time of day. One night, he assaults a stranger at a party, and everything begins to come undone.
Michael Magee’s luminous debut, Close to Home, begins with this sudden act of violence and expands into a startling portrait of working-class Ireland under the long shadow of the Troubles. It’s a first novel drawn from life, written with the immediacy of thought. It’s about what happens when men get desperate, about the cycles of loss and trauma and secrecy that keep them trapped, and about the struggle to get free.
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