Goldengrove

A dark satire about a theatrical agency acting as a front for British counter-terrorism in 1960s Dublin, from the author of Poguemahone, The Butcher Boy and Breakfast on Pluto.

‘Wild, anarchic, and wonderfully head-spinning’ Neil Jordan, award-winning film director

A dark theatrical comedy about the vexed and violent relationship between Britain and Ireland, from twice Booker-shortlisted author Patrick McCabe.

It’s the summer of Brexit, and in a seedy hotel room on the South Coast of England, Chenevix Meredith finds his old comrade Henry Plumm murdered in the bathtub. Piecing together their shared history, Meredith looks back at the years they spent in Dublin half a century ago, running a theatrical agency and rubbing shoulders with actors and assassins alike in the swirling smoke of public houses. What their clients didn’t know, is that the flamboyant pair were undercover agents of the British state, posted to identify terrorist networks.

Goldengrove is a deeply immersive, satirical novel in which nothing is as it seems and no one is who they say they are. Steeped in film noir, classic crime and popular culture, McCabe blurs the lines between what’s real and what’s staged in this absurd game of cat and mouse.

'Yet again Patrick McCabe summons the ghost of Flann O'Brien in this wild rollick of a novel . . . Wonderful, shape-shifting stuff' Colum McCann, author of Apeirogon

'Thunderously compelling and downright ecstatic . . . This is nothing less than the work of a genuine master, a must-read’ Billy O’Callaghan, author of Life Sentences

'One hears Joyce and Beckett and Paul Muldoon in the background. Not because there is any borrowing, but because all alike draw from that same dazzling tradition of oral storytelling' Mark Bowles, author of All My Precious Madness