Book description
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.
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.
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. Patrick McCabe was
born in Clones, Co Monaghan, Ireland, in 1955. His
novels include Carn
; The Dead
School
; The Butcher Boy
, winner of the
Irish Times
/Aer Lingus Literature Prize, shortlisted
for the 1992 Booker Prize and made into a highly acclaimed film directed
by Neil Jordan; Breakfast on Pluto
, also shortlisted
for the Booker Prize; Winterwood
, winner of the
Irish Novel of the Year 2007 and, most recently, The Holy
City
. He lives in Clones.
