PATRICK MCCABE

Now entering his sixty-seventh year, Chris McCool can confidently call himself a member of the Happy Club: he has an attractive and exceedingly accommodating Croatian girlfriend and has been told he bears more than a passing resemblance to Roger Moore. As he looks back on the glory days of his youth, he recalls the swinging sixties of rural Ireland: a decade in which the cool cats sang along to Lulu and drove around in Ford Cortinas, when swinging meant wearing velvet trousers and shirts with frills, and where Dolores McCausland - Dolly Mixtures to those who knew her best - danced on the tops of tables and set the pulses of every man in small-town Cullymore racing. Chris McCool had it all back then. He had the moves, he had the car, and he had Dolly, a woman who purred suggestive songs and tugged gently at her skin-tight dresses, a Protestant femme fatale who was glamorous, transgressive and who called him her very own 'Mr Wonderful'. She was, in short, the answer to this bastard son of a Catholic farmer's prayers. Except that there was another Mr Wonderful in town, a certain Marcus Otoyo - a young Nigerian with glossy curls and a dazzling devoutness that was all but irresistible.Although Chris, of course, was interested in Marcus only because of their shared religious fervour and mutual appreciation of the finer things. That was all. Besides, Mr McCool was always a hopeless romantic - some even described him as excessively so - but is there anything wrong with that? Spiked with macabre humour and disquieting revelations, The Holy City is a brilliant, disturbing and compelling novel from one of Ireland's most original contemporary writers

Strangely elegiac, gloriously epic and driven by Patrick McCabes wild and savage imagination, The Stray Sod Country is an eerie folk tale that chronicles the passing of generation. from the closed terraces and back lanes of rural Ireland to the information highway and global separations of our own time, it is at once an homage to what we think we may have lost and a chilling reminder that the past has never really passed.

The intention was, of course, to bring her out to Winterwood — to that magical place that only me and her knew — but I wouldn't tell her that until much later on, for I wanted it to be as much of a surprise as possible … Kimono! I remember laughing Kimono and Pinkie Pie! The Magic Castle, here we come! Winterwood, a place of dreams and mystery. Once, near Dublin, Redmond was in heaven, married to the sugar-lipped Catherine, and father to lovely daughter Immy. But later, much later, Red did something. And it could all never be like that again. Winterwood, a place of escape and sanctuary. Red meets Auld Pappie Ned, a fiddler and teller of tales with honeyed words who seems the authentic spirit of 'the old valley', indeed a fiddler by nature and a man so mesmerising that Red sees himself anew, so new in fact that only a fresh name will now do as he leaves (he hopes) the demons of his past behind, the apparitions. And then one day Red spies Catherine again … And still even this is not quite enough to save his new love Casey from the man who's called Dominic Tiernan. Winterwood, a place of chill and threat. Of danger, and worse.

"...conocer los sórdidos y despachurrantes detalles de la vida que en una ocasión llevó el querido Patrick Braden -suspiro- dulce Conejito tito tito, criatura perfumada de la noche que solía arrasar en las pasarelas de medio mundo..." Patrick "Conejito" Braden, resplandeciente con su bata y un pañuelo anudado a la cabeza, está sentado en Kilburn, escribiendo su historia: "Vida y milagros de Patrick Braden", para el doctor Terence, su escurridizo psiquiatra, rememorando la verdad que hay tras su vida en Irlanda y el caos de sus días en un pueblo lleno de tragedias. Veinte años atrás se escapó de Tyreelin, su pueblo natal, huyendo de su alcohólica madre adoptiva, "Bigotes" Braden, y su caótico reino -una casa repleta de niños pegajosos y botellas de cerveza de malta vacías- para olvidar los horrores de su infancia y empezar una nueva vida en Londres. Allí desempeña su oficio, ataviado con un blusón y maxifaldas anchas, arriesgando muchas veces la vida, entre los desechos que se pasean por los pubs de Piccadilly Circus. Desayuno en Plutón es una novela horripilante, intensamente turbadora y de una espléndida comicidad, un paseo desde las profundidades de la desesperación y el miedo personal hasta las alturas del glamour más sórdido. Como siempre, Patrick McCabe recrea instintivamente esos tiempos crueles y describe, con aterradora exactitud y una visión estremecedora, la violencia que subyace en el corazón del siglo XX.

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 ...

Francie Brady, un chico sensible, tiene una infancia traumática que le conducirá a una brutal metamorfosis, pasando de ser un niño rebelde a un criminal despiadado. Su trabajo como ayudante de carnicero es sin duda un buen entrenamiento para el crimen.

"Si Roddy Doyle es The Beatles de la ficción irlandesa moderna, Patrick McCabe es The Rolling Stones". Irvine Welsh, autor de Trainspotting.Redmond Hatch regresa a la región montañosa donde nació. Alli conoce a Red Strange, un hombre extraño y seductor que toca el violin y cuenta cuentos tan encantadores que los hombres y mujeres de la zona estan dispuestos a permitir que se acerque a sus pequeños hijos. Hasta que un dia se lo encuentra culpable de actos terribles, cuyas victimas eran, precisamente, esos niños.Una vez, Redmond habia sido feliz. Estaba casado con la bella Catherine y su hija Immy iluminaba sus dias. Pero luego se sintio obligado a protegerla de la infidelidad, la traicion y de otros horrores que amenazaban el magico reino de la pequeña Immy. Ahora Redmond es un vagabundo, perseguido por el espectro terrible de Strange...Redmond decide reinventarse y se convierte en Dominic Tiernan, un exitoso periodista televisivo, con una nueva esposa y una nueva felicidad. Entonces, vuelve a ver a Catherine, y los antiguos terrores regresan para acosarlo nuevamente.Como los mejores relatos, Bosque frio, nombrada mejor novela irlandesa de 2007 por el prestigioso periodico Irish Independent, es una historia sencilla y compleja a la vez, que nos habla del horror mas grande: el que to...