- Title:
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The Holy City
- Written by:
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Patrick McCabe
- Read by:
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Humphrey Bower
- Format:
-
Unabridged CD Audio Book
- Number of CDs:
-
5
- Duration:
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5 hours 57 minutes
- Published:
-
February 01 2010
- Available Date:
-
February 01 2010
- Age Category:
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Adult
- ISBN:
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9781742336855
- Genres:
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Fiction; Contemporary Fiction; Literary Fiction; Psychological Fiction
- Publisher:
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Bolinda audio
Qty
Format
Price
Bolinda price
International bestseller
Award winning author
Irish Author
Winner Irish Book Awards / Hughes & Hughes Irish Novel of the Year 2009
A brilliant, disturbing and compelling piece of Irish fiction from one of Ireland's most original contemporary writers, Patrick McCabe.
Now entering his 67th year, Chris McCool can confidently call himself a member of the Happy Club. As he looks back on the glory days of his youth, he recalls the swinging 60s of rural Ireland. Chris had it all back then.
He had the moves, he had the car and he had Dolly. A woman who danced on the tops of tables and set the pulses of every man in small-town Cullymore racing – 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.
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?
'[A] mesmerizing but unsettling read.'
Booklist
'McCabe has made unreliable narrators his stock-in-trade, and they do not come much more unreliable than sexagenarian boulevardier Chris J. McCool. Throw in a dashing Nigerian and small-town Ireland at its most incestuous and bigoted, and you have a typical McCabe cocktail: black comedy delivered with tongue-in-cheek effervescence.'
The Mail on Sunday
'A hall of mirrors [McCool's] intensifying madness, religious and sexual confusion and mental deterioration are painful to read and cleverly drawn; real and imagined events are veiled with McCabe's engaging lyricism.'
The Times
'McCabe is incapable of not telling an interesting story ... very clever.'
The Los Angeles Times
'Few people can make an unreliable narrator and a vigorously scrambled time-scheme as compelling as McCabe can, and his story telling powers are in full flow in The Holy City.'
The Guardian
'A brilliantly deadpan meeting of the eerie and the comic.'
The Daily Telegraph