A swirling, psychedelic, bleakly funny fugue by the Booker-shortlisted author of The Butcher Boy and Breakfast on Pluto
Una Fogarty, suffering from dementia in a seaside nursing home, would be all alone without her brother Dan, whose epic free-verse monologue tells their family story. Exile from Ireland and immigrant life in England. Their motherâs trials as a call girl. Young Unaâs search for love in a seemingly haunted hippie squat, and the two-timing Scottish stoner poet sheâll never get over. Now she sits outside in the sun as her memories unspool from Danâs mouth and his own role in the tale grows ever strangerâ and more sinister.
A swirling, psychedelic, bleakly funny fugue, Patrick McCabeâs epic reinvention of the verse novel combines Modernist fragmentation and Beat spontaneity with Irish folklore, then douses it in whiskey and sets it on fire. Drinking song and punk libretto, ancient as myth and wholly original, Poguemahone is the devastating telling of one familyâs historyâand the forces, seen and unseen, that make their fate.