Poguemahone

Poguemahone is a novel by Dan Fogarty that tells the story of the Fogarty family, who are exiled from a small Irish village and end up living the hard immigrant life in England. It is a wild, free-verse monologue steeped in music and folklore, crammed with characters, both real and imagined, on a scale Patrick McCabe has never attempted before.

Format: Hardback
Length: 624 pages
Publication date: 14 April 2022
Publisher: Unbound

If you seek this century's Ulysses, look no further. Alex Preston of the Observer calls it a "stunningly lyrical novel." Poguemahone is a remarkable achievement, deeply affecting David Keenan. It is a blistering, brilliant ballad of mad tales from rural Ireland to London Town. The characters are electric, the narrative fueled with a brilliant frenetic energy. McCabe is truly original. Elaine Feeney of the Irish Times describes Dan Fogarty, an Irishman living in England, as caring for his sister Una, now seventy and suffering from dementia in a care home in Margate. From Dan's anarchic account, we gradually piece together the story of the Fogarty family. How the parents are exiled from a small Irish village and end up living the hard immigrant life in England. How Dot, the mother, becomes a call girl in 1950s Soho. How Una, a young and overweight woman, finds herself living in a hippie squat in Kilburn in the early 1970s. How the squat appears to be haunted by vindictive ghosts who eat away at the sanity of all who live there. And, finally, how all that survives now of those sex-and-drug-soaked times are Una's unspooling memories as she sits outside in the Margate sunshine, and Dan himself, whose role in the story becomes stranger and more sinister. Poguemahone is a huge, shape-shifting epic from one of modern Ireland's greatest writers. It is a wild, free-verse monologue steeped in music and folklore, crammed with characters, both real and imagined, on a scale Patrick McCabe has never attempted before.

Weight: 884g
Dimension: 145 x 222 x 57 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781800181113