Patrick McCabe

Malachy Dudgeon has escaped the misery and madness of his childhood home and landed a job in the most famous school in Dublin. The headmaster, Raphael Bell, has overcome his own tragedies to forge a model career, but when Malachy Dudgeon and Raphael Bell meet, they become inextricably engaged in a macabre relationship which proves fatal to their fortunes and their sanity. ‘McCabe can make you howl at the darkest antics . . . He never sets a foot – or syllable – wrong. His novel is death on a laugh-support machine. Stupendous.’ Scotland on Sunday ‘Raphael, the great headmaster, is a marvellous creation . . . McCabe has a charm as a storyteller which is all his own’ Sunday Telegraph ‘Exhilarating. Reading the distilled gouts of consciousness which pour from the minds of these characters is like being trapped on a big dipper with articulate maniacs . . . Horribly funny’ The Times ‘An appallingly funny story . . . horribly memorable’ Times Literary Supplement

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize, a scathingly fully and deeply disturbing novel follows Irish transsexual Patrick "Pussy" Braden as he moves through the London erotic underworld and unwillingly becomes involved in the Troubles of Northern Ireland. Reprint. NYT.

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

"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." Thus begins Patrick McCabe's shattering novel The Butcher Boy, a powerful and unrelenting journey into the heart of darkness. The bleak, eerie voice belongs to Francie Brady, the "pig boy," the only child of and alcoholic father and a mother driven mad by despair. Growing up in a soul-stifling Irish town, Francie is bright, love-starved, and unhinged, his speech filled with street talk, his heart filled with pain...his actions perfectly monstrous. Held up for scorn by Mrs. Nugent, a paragon of middle-class values, and dropped by his best friend, Joe, in favor of her mamby-pamby son, Francie finally has a target for his rage--and a focus for his twisted, horrific plan. Dark, haunting, often screamingly funny, The Butcher Boy chronicles the pig boy's ominous loss of innocence and chilling descent into madness. No writer since James Joyce has had such marvelous control of rhythm and language... and no novel since The Silence Of The Lambs has stunned us with such a macabre, dangerous mind. Shortlisted for the 1992 Booker Prize. Winner of the Irish Times-Aer Lingus Literature Prize for Fiction." An almost perfect novel... A Beckett monologue with plot by Alfred Hitchcock... Startlingly original."--The Washington Post Book World "Stunning...part Huck Finn, part Holden Caufield, part Hannibal Lecter."--The New York Times Book Review "Brilliant, unique. Patrick McCabe pushes your head through the book and you come out the other end gasping, admiring, and knowing that reading fiction will never be the same again. It's the best Irish novel I've read in years."--Roddy Doyle, author of Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha "A chilling tale of a child's hell...often screamingly funny...the book has a compelling and terrible beauty."--The Boston Globe "Lyrical and disturbing, horrific and hilarious."--The New York Times "Patrick McCabe is an outstanding writer. The Butcher Boy is fearful, original, compelling and very hard to put out of your mind. American readers should pay close attention to this man."--Thomas McGuane