About the book:
Francie Brady's collapse narrated entirely from inside his own unraveling mind funny, then suddenly not, then funny again in a way that feels like a small betrayal each time.
One of the great unreliable narrators in modern Irish fiction.
A rare find.
Condition:
Good secondhand condition.
Wear to cover.
Age related tanning to pages.
All pages well bound and intact.
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About the author:
Patrick McCabe (1955 to present)
Born in Clones, County Monaghan, Ireland, in 1955, Patrick McCabe grew up in a small border town steeped in the folklore, music, and lingering traumas of rural Irish life. The son of a teacher and a homemaker, he came of age during the Troubles, an era whose violence, black comedy, and psychological scars would deeply inform his work. After training as a teacher, he worked in various jobsincluding as a musician and in Londonbefore turning fully to writing, eventually settling in County Westmeath.
His early success arrived with novels like The Butcher Boy (1992), which announced a wildly original voice. Over the following decades McCabe developed a singular, hallucinatory style that blends grotesque humor, stream-of-consciousness monologue, folk storytelling, and nightmarish surrealism. Often narrated by damaged, unreliable voices on the edge of breakdown, his fiction hovers between laughter and horror, tenderness and brutality, the mundane and the phantasmagoriccreating a kind of Irish Gothic that is both deeply local and universally unsettling.
Deeply influenced by Irish oral tradition, Flann OBriens playful experimentalism, the grotesque realism of William Faulkner and Carson McCullers, and the dark comedy of Samuel Beckett and Flannery OConnor, McCabe in turn became one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary Irish and British fiction. He has profoundly influenced a generation of writers exploring trauma, unreliable narration, black humor, and the blurred boundary between reality and delusion, including authors such as Eimear McBride, Mike McCormack, and others working in the Irish experimental and grotesque traditions.
Recurring preoccupations include the long shadows of Irish history and the Troubles, the fragility of the human mind, the power of storytelling as both salvation and self-deception, the grotesque comedy of small-town life, and the coexistence of innocence and evil. The Butcher Boy remains his masterpiecea terrifying yet darkly hilarious descent into the mind of a troubled boy; other notable works include Breakfast on Pluto, Winterwood, and Poguemahone, which blend monologue, song, and mythic elements.
McCabe has also written for stage, screen, and childrens literature. His work has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize and adapted into acclaimed films. He continues to live and write in Ireland, producing fiction that is as haunting as it is hilarious.
Patrick McCabes influence on contemporary literature is significant: he revitalized the Irish novel with a raw, musical, and disturbing energy, showing how folklore, madness, and black comedy could illuminate the wounds of history while remaining utterly unique in his feverish, vernacular lyricism and unflinching gaze into the human hearts darker corners.
