My Coney Island Baby

On a bitterly cold winter's afternoon, Michael and Caitlin escape their unhappy marriages to keep an illicit rendez-vous. Once a month, for the past quarter of a century, Coney Island has been their haven.

These precious, hidden hours are their only nourishment. But now, amid the howling of an angry snowstorm, the shut-down, out-of-season resort feels like the edge of the world. And their lives, suddenly, are on the brink - with news of serious illness on one side, and a move to the Midwest on the other. And so, after half a lifetime spent in secret, certain long-avoided facts need to be faced, consequences examined, decisions made, and - perhaps - chances finally taken.

A quiet, intense drama of late-flowering intimacy, My Coney Island Baby condenses, within the course of a single day, the histories, landscapes, tragedies and moments of wonder that constitute the lives of two people who, although born worlds apart, have been drawn together.

O'Callaghan, a masterful prose stylist, has created a devastatingly powerful novel about two unforgettable characters and the choices they have made. This is a book full of sorrow, but also radiant with beauty, longing and breathless desire.

Quiet, subtle and deeply moving... This is a fine novel, with elegance and wisdom lying beneath an unpretentious surface and O'Callaghan, a gifted writer, has managed to do that most difficult of things: take a quiet, almost everyday story and transform it into a thing of beauty. -- John Boyne Irish Times A poignant, piercing meditation on middle age and the passing of time... these characters will linger with you long after the book is closed. -- Claire Kilroy Guardian O'Callaghan [has made a] significant achievement in this fine novel... Good books remind us of other good books and in its treatment of adultery this one calls to mind thematic ancestors such as Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina and The Scarlet Letter. -- Bert Wright Sunday Times Billy O'Callaghan's new novel grips from the opening page. The stride of his sentences is long and powerful, his vision raw. A spectrum of intensities from grief to love is revealed as relationships unfold with an honesty that is utterly believable. -- Bernard MacLaverty Novel of the year is My Coney Island Baby, by Billy O'Callaghan, a lush, precise, poetic account of a love affair that ends the way most love affairs do. We knew O'Callaghan to be a master of the short story, and here he shows the grand reach of his powers as a novelist. -- John Banville Irish Times Books of the Year

Billy O'Callaghan is the author of the critically acclaimed novel My Coney Island Baby, which has been translated into eight languages. His story 'The Boatman' was shortlisted for the Costa Short Story Award. He lives in Douglas, a village on the edge of Cork City.

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