Patrick Mccabe

The Holy City Patrick Mccabe Unabridged edition

Now entering his sixty-seventh year, Chris McCool can confidently call himself a member of the Happy Club: he has an attractive 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. 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. 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. 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. ?McCabe slowly transforms his unreliable narrator from a campy Austin Powers-like figure to a sick creep with a violent streak. [A] mesmerizing but unsettling read.? ? Booklist ?Few people can make an unreliable narrator and a vigorously scrambled time-scheme as compelling as McCabe can, and his storytelling powers are in full flow in The Holy City? ? Guardian ?A hall of mirrors [McCool?s] intensifying madness, religious and sexual confusion and mental deterioration are painful to read and cleverly drawn; real and imagined events are veiled with McCabe?s engaging lyricism? ? The Times