Close to Home by Michael Magee
Luminous and devastating, a portrait of modern masculinity as shaped by class, by trauma, and by silence, but also by the courage to love and to survive. Sean's brother Anthony is a hard man. When they were kids their ma did her best to keep him out of trouble but you can't say anything to Anto. Sean was supposed to be different.
He was supposed to leave and never come back. But Sean does come back. Arriving home after university, he finds Anthony's drinking is worse than ever.
Meanwhile the jobs in Belfast have vanished, 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 loses control and assaults a stranger at a party, and everything is tipped into chaos. Close to Home witnesses the aftermath of that night, as Sean attempts to make sense of who he has become, and to reckon with the relationships that have shaped him, for better and worse.
Drawing from his own experiences, Michael Magee examines the forces which keep young working class men in harm's way, in a debut novel which shines with intelligence and humanity on every page. Close to Home is an extraordinary work of fiction about deciding what kind of a man you want to be and finding your place in the scarred city you call home.
About the Author
Michael Magee is the fiction editor of The Tangerine and a graduate of the PhD Creative Writing programme at Queen's University, Belfast. His writing has appeared in Winter Papers, The Stinging Fly, The Lifeboat and in The 32: An Anthology of Working Class Writing. Close to Home is his first novel.
Praise for Close to Home
“A vision of a post-conflict Belfast that didn't deliver what it promised, blighted by poverty, pain and memory. But far from being bleak, I laughed out loud many times. And it is full of love. Each character is so vividly drawn that I felt like I had met them somewhere before; even the most flawed of them is treated with dignity and respect, and an absence of judgement that reminded me of Annie Ernaux. And the writing! Supple, rich and demotic - Kneecap meets Chekhov - no one else is doing this. I had great hopes for this novel and Michael Magee has booted it out of the park. Absolutely glorious.”
- Louise Kennedy, author of 'Trespasses'
“Magee skilfully paints the landscape of a city still scarred by the Troubles... The book's themes - masculinity, class and history - don't offer easy resolutions. Instead, Magee deftly conveys the anxieties of a generation facing an uncertain future”
- Mia Levitin, Irish Times
“A complex and compassionate portrait of modern Belfast by an impressive new talent... Close to Home is very much a working class novel, but it is many other things too: an Irish novel, a bildungsroman, a novel about the self-congratulatory failures of Northern Ireland's political elite... Perhaps the novel's chief strength is its sharp deconstruction of toxic masculinity”
- Times Literary Supplement
“How beautifully Magee has brought his characters to life, and how intricately he has created their world... It's impressive work: unmistakeably, thrillingly alive”
- Irish Independent (Kevin Power)
Publisher: Hamish Hamilton
Date Published: 6 April, 2023
Hardback, 288 pages
ISBN: 9780241582978
