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McCabe Patrick

Breakfast on Pluto: A Novel

Harper Perennial

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Breakfast on Pluto, Patrick McCabe's lyrical and haunting new novel, became a #1 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. With wonderful delicacy and subtle insight and intimation, McCabe creates Mr. Patrick "Pussy" Braden, the enduringly and endearingly hopeful hero(ine) whose gutsy 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. Twenty years ago, her ladyship escaped her hometown of Tyreelin, Ireland, fleeing her foster mother Whiskers (prodigious Guinness-guzzler, human chimney) and her mad household, to begin a new life in London. There, in blousey tops and satin miniskirts, she plies her trade, often risking life and limb amongst the flotsam and jetsam that fill the bars of Piccadilly Circus. But suave businessmen and lonely old women are not the only dangers that threaten Pussy. It is the 1970's 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 light and dark, laughter and pain, with such sensitivity, directness and restraint that the dramatic impact reverberates in our minds and hearts long after the initial impression.

Patrick McCabe hit pay dirt with his third novel, The Butcher Boy, which was short-listed for the 1992 Booker Prize, filmed by Neil Jordan, and acclaimed as "a masterpiece of literary ventriloquism." In his fifth, Breakfast on Pluto, also on the Booker shortlist, McCabe produces another inimitable voice to amuse and infuriate, mimicking perfectly the overwrought, near-hysterical style of a character whose emotional processes were cruelly halted somewhere around the age of 14, and whose tale requires English literature's highest concentration of exclamation marks.

Patrick "Pussy" Brady is recording her memoirs for the mysterious Dr. Terence, and it's quite some story. After randy Father Bernard gets carried away with his temporary housekeeper, a dead ringer for Mitzi Gaynor, the result is Patrick Braden, abandoned on a doorstep in a Rinso box and condemned to a foster home with the alcoholic Hairy Braden. Escape comes in fantasies of Vic Damone and the occasional glitzy frock, and eventually, inevitably, the rebaptised "Pussy" heads for life as a transvestite rent boy on Piccadilly's Meat Rack. But this is not just Pussy's story; as hitherto-muffled paramilitary violence blows up in her face, Pussy falls apart, providing a vivid and unsettling final comment on the human price paid in 1970s Ireland. --Alan Stewart

The Butcher Boy

Delta

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"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.
"I was thinking how right ma was -- Mrs. Nugent all smiles when she met us and how are you getting on Mrs and young Francis are you both well? . . .what she was really saying was: Ah hello Mrs Pig how are you and look Philip do you see what's coming now -- The Pig Family!"

This is a precisely crafted, often lyrical, portrait of the descent into madness of a young killer in small-town Ireland. "Imagine Huck Finn crossed with Charlie Starkweather," said The Washington Post. Short-listed for the Bram Stoker Award and England's prestigious Booker Prize.

The Holy City: A Novel

Bloomsbury USA

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A disturbing and darkly funny new novel from the award-winning author of Breakfast on Pluto, The Butcher Boy, and Winterwood.

In this hypnotic novel, Chris McCool, the dandyish, debonair playboy of a small and insulated community called the Happy Club, reflects on his two lives: the one he lives and the darker one he’s tried hard to forget. The illegitimate son of a rich Protestant landowner’s wife and a poor Catholic farmer, Chris wanted to be a sixties swinger—driving a Ford Cortina, owning a pair of purple velvet flares—but, despite his good intentions, could not overcome the mysteries and regrets of his own upbringing.

With a series of deftly Freudian flourishes, McCabe gives us a narrator whose own insecurities, and most importantly his obsession with a young Catholic Nigerian boy named Marcus Otoyo, prevent him from seeing the truth about what he is capable of. Are Chris’s inner struggles with his parentage and religion merely personal quests—or do they mask an angrier, more dangerous person beneath?

Tense, artful, and eerily compelling, The Holy City is a novel of faith, anxiety, and dark secrets, with a stunning and brilliant conclusion.
The Dead School

Delta

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From the award-winning author of The  Butcher Boy comes a new novel of  extraordinary power that, according to the San Francisco  Chronicle, "confirm[s] McCabe's standing as one  of the most brilliant writers to ever come out of  Ireland."

In The  Dead School, Patrick McCabe returns to the  emotionally dense landscape of small-town Ireland  to explore the inner lives of two men: a  headmaster and a schoolteacher, each man the product of a  soul-stifling culture, each battling his own demons  of loss and betrayal. Tension coils--until tragedy  strikes a young student in their charge, and the  latent despair and rage that has festered in their  hearts explodes onto the page. As in The  Butcher Boy, McCabe demonstrates his  remarkable command of the vernacular and an uncanny  ability to pinpoint the exact moment when ordinary  minds take flight into madness. Equally  compelling, equally heartbreaking in its impact,   The Dead School has established McCabe  as one of the most celebrated writers of literary  fiction today.
"All it takes is one thing to go wrong and then--well everything else decides to follow suit I'm afraid. Mr Sun, who a minute before was saying, 'Hello! I'm Mr Sun! I'm your friend on this happy picnic day!' is opening up a big sunny mouth full of razor teeth." Macabre humor, grisly horrors, likeable characters, madness and pathos, shrewd allusions to pop songs and movies, and a supple prose style that sounds like Irish speech when read aloud--Patrick McCabe does it all. The Dead School is a dazzling novel, more complex and even more gripping than McCabe's The Butcher Boy. Here are the stories of two very different Irishmen, from different generations, whose lives intersect for a brief and mutually destructive time, and then continue, in misery, apart. McCabe deftly avoids the easy or dramatic ending and delivers instead the saddest, funniest, most horrible ending of all because it is so true to life.
The Stray Sod Country

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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 brylcream in his hair, and a Cuban-heeled swagger to his step, having experienced his coming-of-age in Butlin's, Skegness. 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 prepare 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. With echoes of Peyton Place and Fellinni's Amarcord, and with a sinister, diabolical narrator at its heart, this is at once a story of a small town - with its secrets, fears, friendships and betrayals - and a sweeping, grand guignol of theatrical extravagance from one of the finest writers of his generation. From the closed terraces and back lanes of rural Ireland to the information highway and global separations of our own time, The Stray Sod Country is at once an homage to what we think we may have lost and a chilling reminder that the past has never really passed.
Winterwood: A Novel

Bloomsbury USA

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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 againÂ…  

In Patrick McCabe's spellbinding new novel, nothingÂ--and no oneÂ--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.  

McCabe Patrick News




Cork looking to keep financial difficulties off the pitch - Irish Times
Irish Times, Ireland - Feb 11, 642
Cork looking to keep financial difficulties off the pitchWinger Gary McCabe is fit to return for Bray following a calf injury, though Derek Pender (ankle) remains out. Tonight's Fixtures (7.45 unless stated): Premier Division: Cork City v Bohemians; Dundalk v Sligo Rovers; St Patrick's Athletic v Bray

MICK McCABE'S BLOG Grand Ledge coach finds two games worth missing - Detroit Free Press
Detroit Free Press, United States - May 13, 2009
MICK McCABE'S BLOG Grand Ledge coach finds two games worth missingBy MICK McCABE • FREE PRESS SPORTS WRITER • May 12, 2009 This is Pat O'Keefe's 41st year as Grand Ledge's baseball coach and until last week he had missed just two games. “I missed a doubleheader when mom was dying in Standish about 15 years ago,”

Police officers pave way of Melrose's highest paid - Boston Globe
Boston Globe, United States - May 29, 2009
Police officers pave way of Melrose's highest paid - Boston Globe Boston GlobePolice officers pave way of Melrose's highest paidBy Kathy McCabe Twenty-three city of Melrose employees earned $100000 or more last year, with police officers dominating the ranks, along with a handful of school department administrators, according to a Globe review of public payroll records.

Amherst Middle School - Nashua Telegraph
Nashua Telegraph, NH - May 12, 2009
Amherst Middle SchoolAndrew G. MacDonald, Kaitlyn M. Maloney, Pia K. Marciano, Emily M. Maresco, Kenzie L. McCabe, Patrick M. McKnight, Ryan J. Peterson, Micah J. Quindazzi, Brian E. Ringenwald, Katherine E. Schwope, Sean C. Tatar, Glenna E. Taylor, Audrey Tucker, Nashua High School South

Dean's List Announced: Spring 2009 - Marywood University News & Events
Marywood University News & Events, PA - Feb 11, 7052
Dean's List Announced: Spring 2009 Roaring Brook Twp.; Michele Louise May, Dickson City; Rebecca Lee May, Ashley; Christopher Maza, Dickson City; Jaymie Taylor McAlister, West Caldwell, NJ; Samantha L. McCabe, Somerset, NJ; Mary R. McPherson, Little Meadows; Jessica Meoni, Scranton;