Patrick McCabe – författare

A startling collection of plays by playwrights working in the north and south of Ireland, all of which have been groundbreaking events in contemporary Irish theatre At The Black Pig's Dyke by Vincent Woods depicts a group of mummers in the borderland between North and South, blending their rituals of death with the all-too-modern assassins going about their awful task; in Hard To Believe by Conall Morrison an army intelligence agent for the British invokes his Protestant preacher grandfather and his turncoat father who married a Catholic and thereafter denied his background; in Disco Pigs by Enda Walsh two friends bonded in their fantasies and shared baby-talk face into Cork city on their seventeenth birthday; Frank Pig Says Hello by Patrick McCabe (Winner of the 1997 George Devine Award) is about the sullen meanness of a village community towards an innocently simple young man; in Language Roulette by Daragh Carville a group of young people in Belfast come together for a reunion and the underlying atmosphere is anger and revenge; Bat The Father, Rabbit The Son by Donal O'Kelly is a powerful personal story about the reversal of a father-son relationship where the son is envious of the father's unambitious expressiveness.Foreword by the award-winning Irish playwright, Sebastian Barry

Once, in Kilburn, married to the sugar-lipped Catherine and sharing his daughter Immy's passion for the enchanted kingdom of winterwood, Redmond Hatch was happy. But then infidelity, betrayal and the 'scary things' from which he would protect his daughter steal into the magic kingdom, and bad things begin to happen. Now Redmond - once little Red - prowls the barren outlands alone, haunted by the disgraced shade of Ned Strange, a fiddler and teller of tales from his home in the mountainy middle of Ireland.

A modern classic of Irish fiction, shortlisted for the 1992 Booker Prize.When I was a young lad twenty or thirty or forty years ago I lived in a small town where they were all after me on account of what I done on Mrs Nugent.Francie Brady is a small-town rascal who spends his days turning a blind eye to the troubles at home and getting up to mischief with his best friend Joe – hiding in the chicken-house, shouting abuse at fish in the local stream. But after a disagreement with his neighbour Mrs Nugent over her son's missing comic books, Francie's reckless streak spirals out of control and gives rise to a monstrous obsession . . .Fearless, shocking and blackly funny, Patrick McCabe's The Butcher Boy won the 1992 Irish Times Literature Prize and was shortlisted for the 1992 Booker Prize. It is a modern classic of Irish fiction, a portrait of the insidious violence latent in small town life and of a frenzied young man lashing out at everyone, even himself.Now part of the Picador Collection, a series showcasing the very best of modern literature.

From internationally acclaimed author Patrick McCabe, the Booker Prize-nominated novel that tracks the chaotic life of an abandoned orphan who escapes her hometown, braving the combustible streets of London in the 1970s.With wonderful delicacy and subtle insight and intimation, McCabe creates Mr Patrick “Pussy” Braden, the endearingly hopeful hero(ine) whose gutsy survival and yearning quest for love drive the glimmering, agonizing narrative in which the troubles are a distant and immediate echo and refrain.Twenty years ago, her ladyship escaped her hometown of Tyreelin, Ireland, fleeing her foster mother Whiskers (prodigious Guinness-guzzler, human chimney) and her mad household, to begin life anew in London. There, in blousy tops and satin miniskirts, she plies her trade, often risking life and limb amongst the flotsam and jetsam that fill the bars of Piccadilly Circus.But suave businessmen and lonely old women are not the only dangers that threaten Pussy. It is the 1970s and fear haunts the streets of London and Belfast as the critical mass of history builds up, and Pussy is inevitably drawn into a maelstrom of violence and tragedy destined to blow her fragile soul asunder.Now part of the Picador Collection, a series showcasing the very best of modern literature.

‘If you’re looking for this century’s Ulysses, look no further’ - Observer‘Wildly original’ - Times Literary SupplementDan Fogarty is visiting his seventy-year-old sister Una, who is living in a care home in Margate. Una has dementia, but she is still able to recall her youth, spent in a hippie commune in South London. A picture of their family’s history begins to emerge; the Fogartys were evicted from their home of Currabawn in Ireland in the 1950s, and both Dan and Una have been haunted by this forced exile.A sprawling, dazzlingly inventive novel in verse, Poguemahone cements McCabe’s status as one of Ireland’s greatest writers.Now part of the Picador Collection, a series showcasing the very best of modern literature.

‘This is nothing less than the work of a genuine master, a must-read’ - Billy O'Callaghan‘Wonderful, shape-shifting stuff’ - Colum McCannChenevix Meredith, recently retired, is whiling away his time somewhere on the south coast of England, when his old colleague, Henry Plumm, is found dead. The discovery prompts Meredith to reminisce about their days in 1960s Dublin, where the pair ran a theatrical agency – except this theatrical agency was actually an outpost of the British state, and the duo were investigating the city’s terrorist networks as undercover agents. Now, following the murder of his friend, Meredith is forced to contend with the buried darkness of their past.Now part of the Picador Collection, a series showcasing the very best of modern literature.

Now entering his sixty-seventh year, Chris McCool can confidently call himself a member of the Happy Club: he has an attractive and exceedingly accommodating Croatian girlfriend and has been told he bears more than a passing resemblance to Roger Moore. As he looks back on the glory days of his youth, he recalls the swinging sixties of rural Ireland: a decade in which the cool cats sang along to Lulu and drove around in Ford Cortinas, when swinging meant wearing velvet trousers and shirts with frills, and where Dolores McCausland - Dolly Mixtures to those who knew her best - danced on the tops of tables and set the pulses of every man in small-town Cullymore racing. Chris McCool had it all back then. He had the moves, he had the car, and he had Dolly, a woman who purred suggestive songs and tugged gently at her skin-tight dresses, a Protestant femme fatale who was glamorous, transgressive and who called him her very own 'Mr Wonderful'. She was, in short, the answer to this bastard son of a Catholic farmer's prayers. Except that there was another Mr Wonderful in town, a certain Marcus Otoyo - a young Nigerian with glossy curls and a dazzling devoutness that was all but irresistible.Although Chris, of course, was interested in Marcus only because of their shared religious fervour and mutual appreciation of the finer things. That was all. Besides, Mr McCool was always a hopeless romantic - some even described him as excessively so - but is there anything wrong with that? Spiked with macabre humour and disquieting revelations, The Holy City is a brilliant, disturbing and compelling novel from one of Ireland's most original contemporary writers.

It is 1958, and as Laika, the Sputnik dog is launched into space, Golly Murray, the Cullymore barber's wife, finds herself oddly obsessing about the canine cosmonaut. Meanwhile, Fonsey 'Teddy' O'Neill, is returning, like the prodigal son, from overseas, with brylcream in his hair, and a Cuban-heeled swagger to his step, having experienced his coming-of-age in Butlin's, Skegness. Father Augustus Hand is working on a bold new theatrical production for Easter, which he, for one, knows will put Cullymore on the map. And, as the Manchester United football team prepare to take off from Munich airport, James A Reilly sits in his hovel by the lake outside town, with his pet fox and his father's gun, feeling the weight of an insidious and inscrutable presence pressing down upon him.From the closed terraces and back lanes of rural Ireland to the information highway and global separations of our own time, The Stray Sod Country is at once an homage to what we think we may have lost and a chilling reminder that the past has never really passed.With echoes of Peyton Place, and Fellinni's Amarcord, and with a sinister, diabolical narrator at its heart, this is at once a story of a small town - with its secrets, fears, friendships and betrayals - and a sweeping, grand guignol of theatrical extravagance from one of the finest writers of his generation.

Meet Pat McNab, forty-five years old, often to be found endlessly puffing smokes and propping up the counter of Sullivan’s Select Bar or sitting on his mother’s knee, both of them singing away together like some ridiculous two-headed human juke box. But that was all before the story really begins. Emerald Germs of Ireland is, in essence, Pat McNab’s post-matricide year. This is another great romp from the master of black comedy.

You wouldn't expect to find a mature woman of twenty-eight years of age mixed up with a bunch of swingers in a small town like Barntrosna. But that's exactly what happened according to Walter Bunyan. And he should know, she was his wife. As for Declan Coyningham - there wasn't a holier boy in all of Barntrosna - you couldn't move in town without finding a bit of him in your path or under a hedge. And what exactly did come over Noreen Tiernan that made her shriek to wake the dead as she left the main street of the village in a Morris Minor all decked in pink and blue?Patrick McCabe's prose is as brilliantly macabre as ever. In scenes of disarming inventiveness, Mondo Desperado will make you howl with laughter from first unnerving page to last.

‘It seemed as if the town of Carn, a huddled clump of windswept grey buildings split in two by a muddied main street, had somehow been spirited away and supplanted by a thriving, bustling place which bore no resemblance whatever to it.For a split second, she saw her own death, a gunmetal face fixed on the sky, all around the faces and voices of Carn as she had known it. Josie Keenan had come home to the town of Carn, the only home she knew’‘A unique record by somebody who understands that the reality of small-town life is as important in literature as any aspect of Ireland . . . a savage, raw and bitter honesty . . . I know no Irish writer with such an obvious, extraordinary talent’ Dermot Bolger, Sunday Independent‘Powerful, precise writing – Patrick McCabe’s Carn introduces one of the most promising writers in a long, long time’ Bill Buford, Granta‘Resolute . . . the writing is raw and didactic. His story bears the hideous ring of authenticity’ Guardian‘Stylishly narrated, but with the chronological forthrightness that comes as a benison after some modern novels’ London Review of Books

Welcome to Hello and Goodbye: two dark tales from two deceased narrators - bottled-lightning treats that will make you gasp, gurn, shiver and squirm. HELLO MR BONES: two damaged souls have, thanks to each other's love, turned their lives around. But as London's weather takes a turn for the worse, so do their fates, when raw evil runs riot the night of the impossible hurricane. GOODBYE MR RAT: an IRA bomber watches over his ex-lover as she takes his ashes back to his rural hometown. This girl from northern Indiana may not be ready for rural Ireland, yet the townsfolk of Iron Valley certainly have plans for her...Stark, blackly humorous and compressed to the point of detonation; McCabe writes like M. R. James took a dread wrong turning on an Irish country road.

Welcome to Hello and Goodbye: two dark tales from two deceased narrators - bottled-lightning treats that will make you gasp, gurn, shiver and squirm. HELLO MR BONES: two damaged souls have, thanks to each other's love, turned their lives around. But as London's weather takes a turn for the worse, so do their fates, when raw evil runs riot the night of the impossible hurricane. GOODBYE MR RAT: an IRA bomber watches over his ex-lover as she takes his ashes back to his rural hometown. This girl from northern Indiana may not be ready for rural Ireland, yet the townsfolk of Iron Valley certainly have plans for her...Stark, blackly humorous and compressed to the point of detonation; McCabe writes like M. R. James took a dread wrong turning on an Irish country road.

‘If you’re looking for this century’s Ulysses, look no further … a stunningly lyrical novel’ Alex Preston, Observer‘Pitched – deliriously – between high modernism and folk magic, between gorgeous free-verse and hilarious Irish vernacular, 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 FeeneyDan 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 and overweight Una finds herself living in a hippie squat in Kilburn in the early 1970s. How the squat appears to be haunted by vindictive ghosts who eat away at the sanity of all who live there. And, finally, how all that survives now of those sex-and-drug-soaked times are Una’s unspooling memories as she sits outside in the Margate sunshine, and Dan himself, whose role in the story becomes stranger and more sinister.Poguemahone is a huge, 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.