Novels
- Carn (1989)
- The Butcher Boy (1992)
- The Adventures of Shay Mouse (1994)
- The Dead School (1995)
- Breakfast on Pluto (1998)
- Emerald Germs of Ireland (2001)
- Call Me the Breeze (2003)
- Winterwood (2006)
- The Holy City (2008)
- The Stray Sod Country (2010)
- Heartland (2018)
- The Big Yaroo (2019)
- Poguemahone (2022)
Omnibus
- Hello Mr. Bones / Goodbye Mr. Rat (2013)
Collections
- Mondo Desperado (1999)
Novellas
- Goodbye Mr Rat (2013)
- Hello Mr Bones (2013)
Non fiction
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Patrick McCabe Books Overview
Carn
Patrick McCabe, whom the San Francisco Chronicle called ‘one of the most brilliant writers ever to come out of Ireland,’ presents another compelling novel of small town Ireland that leaves its indelible mark on the canon of classic fiction. Carn is the story of two women; Josie Keenan, who returns to Carn, Ireland, the provincial hometown she once left behind, and Sadie Rooney, a factory worker who dreams of leaving. As the two women strike up a friendship fueled by hopes to better their lives, yet inextricably tied to the tenuous fate of Carn each must confront the hard truths of her past and future. And despite its own attempt to thrive, the town itself cannot escape the daily reminders of Ireland’s endless legacy of violence and unrest. Written in the raw, unsparing prose that marks McCabe’s fiction, Carn is the timeless story of a small town struggling to break away from its bleak past, and the lives of two women aching to escape the forces that shaped them.
The Butcher Boy
‘When I was a young lad twenty or thirty or forty years ago I lived in a small town where they were all after me on account of what I done on Mrs. Nugent.’Thus begins Patrick McCabe’s shattering novel The Butcher Boy, a powerful and unrelenting journey into the heart of darkness. The bleak, eerie voice belongs to Francie Brady, the ‘pig boy,’ the only child of and alcoholic father and a mother driven mad by despair. Growing up in a soul stifling Irish town, Francie is bright, love starved, and unhinged, his speech filled with street talk, his heart filled with pain…
his actions perfectly monstrous. Held up for scorn by Mrs. Nugent, a paragon of middle class values, and dropped by his best friend, Joe, in favor of her mamby pamby son, Francie finally has a target for his rage and a focus for his twisted, horrific plan. Dark, haunting, often screamingly funny, The Butcher Boy chronicles the pig boy’s ominous loss of innocence and chilling descent into madness. No writer since James Joyce has had such marvelous control of rhythm and language…
and no novel since The Silence Of The Lambs has stunned us with such a macabre, dangerous mind.
The Dead School
The critically acclaimed author of The Butcher Boy returns to small town Ireland to journey inside the world of a schoolteacher and a headmaster, as they grapple with their own demons and struggle to cope with the tragedy that strikes a young student in their charge. Tour.
Breakfast on Pluto
Patrick McCabe, already acclaimed as one of the most gifted Irish novelist writing today, is increasingly being recognized internationally as a writer of true literary stature, with an ever growing popular readership. Breakfast on Pluto, his lyrical and haunting new novel, became a number one bestseller in Ireland, stayed on the bestseller list for months, and was nominated for the Booker Prize, one of the world’s most prestigious literary awards. It was the sole Irish novel to be so honored, and McCabe is that rare writer who has had his work twice nominated, having been previously selected in 1992 for his classic novel The Butcher Boy, which won the Irish Times/Aer Lingus Irish Literature Prize, was recently released as a major motion picture, and joined Breakfast on Pluto on the Irish bestseller lists. With wonderful delicacy and subtle insight and intimation, McCabe creates Mr. Patrick ‘Pussy’ Braden, the enduringly and endearingly hopeful hero*ine whose gutty survival and yearning quest for love resonate in and drive the glimmering, agonizing narrative in which the Troubles are a distant and immediate echo and refrain. As Breakfast on Pluto opens, her ladyship, resplendent in housecoat and head scarf, reclines in Kilburn, London, writing her story for the elusive psychiatrist Dr. Terence, paring her fingernails as she reawakens the truth behind her life and the chaos of long ago days in a city filled with hatred. Twenty years ago, she escaped her hometown of Tyreelin, Ireland, fleeing her foster mother, Whisker prodigious Guinness guzzler, human chimney and her mad household endless doorstep babas!, to begin a new life in London. There, in blousey tops and satin miniskirts, she plies her trade, often risking life and limb among the flotsam and jetsam who fill the bars of Piccadilly Circus ‘You want love? That what you want, orphaned boy without a home? Then die for it! Die! Die, sweet Irish!. But suave businessmen and lonely old women are not the only dangers that threaten Pussy’s existence. It is the 1970s, and fear haunts the streets of London and Belfast as the critical mass of history builds up, and Pussy is inevitably drawn into a maelstrom of violence and tragedy destined to blow his fragile soul asunder. Brilliant, startling, profound, and soaring, Breakfast on Pluto combines lightness and darkness, laughter and pain, with such sensitivity, directness, and restraint that the dramatic impact reverberates in our minds and hearts long, long after the initial impression.
Emerald Germs of Ireland
Meet Pat McNab, forty five years old, often to be found endlessly puffing smokes and propping up the counter of Sullivan’s Select Bar or sitting on his mother’s knee, both of them singing away together like some ridiculous two headed human juke box. But that was all before the story really begins. ‘Emerald Germs of Ireland‘ is, in essence, Pat McNab’s post matricide year. This is another great romp from the master of black comedy. ”Emerald Germs’ is an extraordinary confection. Melancholy, nasty, and extremely funny’ Jane Shilling, ‘Sunday Telegraph’. ‘A mesmerising, disturbing and sometimes wildly funny book’ Carolyn Hart, ‘Marie Claire’, Book of the Month.
Call Me the Breeze
In a small town in Northern Ireland, in the troubling psychedelic gone wrong atmosphere of the late seventies, Joey Tallon embarks on a journey of selfhood, of redemption, and of rebirth. A man deranged by desire, and longing for belonging, with the words of T. S. Eliot as his guide ‘We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time’ Tallon searches for his ‘place of peace,’ a spiritual landscape located somewhere between Ireland and Iowa, and maybe between heaven and hell. Following the delusional, but also ultimately likable, Tallon on his quest, we unwittingly enter a world constructed by a character who is arguably more lucid during his acid trips than when he’s sober. What begins as a baffling mystery in McCabe’s hands becomes a raucous and ribald adventure. From Tallon’s punk rock beginnings, to his stewardship of his prison’s literary society, to his brief tenure as director of the Youth in Action Creative Arts Awareness Scheme, and finally to his bull like charge into the political arena, Joey’s journey toward enlightenment and deliverance takes readers into the innermost heart of a man at odds with himself and the violent, sometimes surreal world around him. Hilarious, poignant, and unpredictable, Call Me the Breeze is a literary odyssey five years in the making. It is Patrick McCabe at his absolute best.
Winterwood
Once, Redmond Hatch was in heaven, married to the lovely Catherine and father to enchanting daughter Immy. But then he took them both to Winterwood. And it would never be the same again In Patrick McCabe’s spellbinding new novel, nothing and no one are ever quite what they seem. When Hatch, devoted husband and father, revisits the secluded mountains where he grew up, he meets Auld Pappie Ned. While he claims to be just a harmless local fiddler, a teller of tall tales, Ned sets off a cataclysmic chain of events in Redmond s life. From the mysterious disappearance of Redmond s daughter to the reluctant remembrance of a troubled boyhood to secret glimpses into an unstable marriage, everything soon spirals out of control. Narrated with hypnotic precision and fractured lyricism, Winterwood is a disturbing and unforgettable tale of love, death and identity from a masterful novelist.
The Holy City
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 bast*ard 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.
The Stray Sod Country
It is 1958, and as Laika, the Sputnik dog, is launched into space, Golly Murray, the Cullymore barber’s wife, finds herself oddly obsessing about the canine cosmonaut. Meanwhile, Fonsey ‘Teddy’ O’Neill is returning, like the prodigal son, from overseas, with Brylcreem in his hair and a Cuban heeled swagger to his step, having experienced his coming of age in Skegness, England. Father Augustus Hand is working on a bold new theatrical production for Easter, which he, for one, knows will put Cullymore on the map. And, as the Manchester United football team prepares to take off from Munich airport, James A. Reilly sits in his hovel by the lake outside town, with his pet fox and his father’s gun, feeling the weight of an insidious and inscrutable presence pressing down upon him. As these imperiled characters wrestle with their identities, mysteriously powerful narrator plucks, gently, at the strings of their fates, and watches the twitching response. This novel is a devil’s eye view of a lost era, a sojourn to the dark side of our past, one we may not have come back from. With echoes of Peyton Place and Fellini’s Amarcord, and with a sinister narrator at its heart, this is at once a story of a small town with its secrets, fears, friendships, and betrayals and a sweeping, theatrical extravagance from one of the finest writers of his generation.
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