Book description
My name is Justin Alexander Torquhil Edward Peregrine Montague, but
my father calls me 'you little bollocks', or when he is in a good
mood, 'old cock'. It's 1963 in a country house in west Wicklow during
the heady summer of JFK's visit to Ireland. Turbulence is in the air
as Justin is locked in combat with his angry and inebriate father. A
dark and poignant comedy unfolds and progresses to winter as Kennedy
is assassinated and Justin ends his oedipal struggle and comes of age.
Replete with the perennial tensions between native and settler,
servant and master, Camelot and Leinster House, this poignant tale
concerns identity and first love, and the pain of a knowing child
living amongst aliens. Told with the panache of Roddy Doyle crossed
with J. D. Salinger, it conveys the spirit of a bygone age and the
very present emotions of a fast-growing boy. It is a masterful debut
novel. "A subtler kind of Irish eccentricity pervades The House
of Slamming Doors. Set at the time of President Kennedy's visit to
Ireland in 1963, Mark Macauley's enjoyable tale of a dysfunctional
clan of Anglo-Irish aristocrats centers on 13-year-old Justin
Montague, heir to a rural estate, who enrages his bullying father by
befriending a servant's daughter. But there is equal pleasure in its
depiction of the time-warped world of the big house, stuck uneasily
between the ears of the wind-up gramophone and the Dansette
record-player." -- The Financial Times. "The funniest, most
beguiling, cruelly dysfunctional family ever." -- John
Boorman."Packed with hilarious incident and pathos...an audacious
one-off." -- The Guardian. "This Ireland is lyrical and
vibrant and honest." -- Carol Birch, The TLS
Mark Macauley was born in 1956 and raised on the edge of the Wicklow
Mountains. He lives between London and Africa and makes documentaries
and writes screenplays. This is his first novel.
