Book description
"If I had urinated immediately after breakfast, the Mob would
never have burnt down the Orphanage." So begins the acclaimed,
prize-winning tale of Jude, a Tipperary-reared orphan who on his 18th
birthday sets off to discover the wide world and his true parentage.
His picaresque adventures take him first to the "Sodom of the
West" - Galway - where he falls in love, encounters temptations
galore and, disguised as Stephen Hawking, unwittingly blows up the HQ
of a Multi-National Corporation - and himself. Jude hotfoots it to
Dublin, in pursuit of Angela, ex-Galway chip-shop employee and his
True Love. A spectacular, riotous chase through the city of Ulysses
ensues, transformed by Gough's talent into a dazzling metaphor of 21st
century violence, alienation and progress.
Julian Gough was born in London, to immigrant Irish parents living in
a bedsit. When he was seven, the family returned to Nenagh, Co.
Tipperary, when he was educated in a Christian Brothers school so tough
that one of his teachers ran away. Julian gained a degree in English and
Philosophy in Galway, where - lacking a private income, but desirous of
becoming a writer - he signed on the dole for ten years. In that time,
he learned how to write fiction, and crafted the lyrics for four albums
by underground rock band Toasted Heretic. His first novel, Juno &
Juliet, was published in 2001. He has spent the subsequent ten years
writing the Jude trilogy. At the height of the Irish property bubble, in
2006, he was evicted, and spent a year living in friends' empty houses
in Dublin and France. (He now lives in Berlin.) The first volume of Jude
was published in 2007. He has since won the BBC National Short Story
Award, an American Pushcart Prize, and been shortlisted for the
Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize. He represented Ireland in Best
European Fiction 2010. His popular BBC radio play, The Great Hargeisa
Goat Bubble, has been adapted for the stage, and will be produced next
year.
