Close to Home
A Novel
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
While growing up in West Belfast, Sean does everything he's supposed to do. He works hard, he studies, and he - mostly - stays out of trouble. The thirty-year conflict is over, he's told, and his future is lit with promise.
But when Sean returns home from university, he finds much of the same-the same friends doing the same gear in the same clubs; the same lost brothers and mad fathers; the same closed doors; the same silences. There are no jobs, Sean's degree isn't worth the paper it's written on, and no one will give him the time of day. One night, he assaults a stranger at a party, and everything begins to come undone.
Close to Home begins with this sudden act of violence and expands into a startling portrait of working-class Ireland under the long shadow of the Troubles. It's a first novel drawn from life, written with the immediacy of thought. It's about what happens when men get desperate, about the cycles of loss and trauma and secrecy that keep them trapped, and about the struggle to get free.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Magee debuts with a consummate and searching bildungsroman of a young Belfast man trying to square his future with a painful heritage. It's 2013, and Sean has just earned an English degree in Liverpool, his departure from Belfast alone a feat among his old mates, who came of age with no prospects in the wake of the 2008 recession. Now he's back home, squatting in a dodgy flat, stealing groceries to survive, and trying to hold down a nightclub job while getting blasted on cocaine and vodka with his friends. The sectarian violence of the Troubles is in the rearview, but the memories are ever-present. His mother, whom he moves back in with after the squat is repossessed, used to hide guns in their house when he was a little boy; and his estranged father narrowly avoided execution by the IRA. In a poignant series of revelations, Magee shows why Sean's father was targeted, why he was saved, and why Sean doesn't see him anymore. Along the way, Sean serves out a community service sentence for assault, another event that Sean gradually unpacks in his thoughtful narration. He also makes new friends from nearby Queen's University, who offer glimmers of a different life. Magee demonstrates profound psychological acuity and a keen sense of place, showing how Belfast has shaped his characters and how the past is etched into the streets. His strongest achievement is in the sensitive portrait of Sean, who doesn't want to lie to himself and eventually works up to the truth. Readers won't want this to end.
