Close to Home

Exceptional … Every detail rings true, every character is fleshy and real and heartbreaking … Magee has a remarkable talent * Sunday Times (Laura Hackett) *Taut and impressive, unfaltering and deftly executed … [It] feels like that rarest of things: a genuinely necessary book * Guardian (Keiran Goddard) *An exceptional debut destined for novel of the year shortlists * Irish Times (Martin Doyle) *Michael Magee is a born storyteller. By the end of the novel I wanted to book a flight to Ireland just to walk around and imagine who was where … I read this in two or three sittings only because I wanted to slow down and spend more time with Magee’s considered and companionate writing. I finished it only last month, but plan to take it with me abroad to enjoy it once more * Guardian ‘2023 Summer Reads’ (Derek Owusu) *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’Unflinching, direct, disarmingly sensitive … Suffusing his narrative with honesty and grace, Magee succeeds in bringing his neighborhood to life for readers and suggests that, amid what seems like a never-ending struggle, there is always room for hope * The Washington Post *Michael Magee’s Close to Home, amazingly a first novel, is about what it’s like to be young and working class right now in Northern Ireland, and is a tremendous read, tensed and immersive, punching the air between hope and despair, deeply decent, unputdownable * Guardian ‘2023 Summer Reads’ (Ali Smith) *Wonderful. A debut overflowing with years of experience and carefully worked craft. By turns hard-edged and soft-hearted, this novel is a gift from Michael Magee to us all – Jon McGregor, author of ‘Reservoir 13’The message of Michael Magee’s dead-on debut novel is universal. At its core, Close to Home is about finding a way to transcend the pain, the people and the place you’re born into * The New York Times *A complex and compassionate portrait of modern Belfast by an impressive new talent … Close to Home is a working class novel, an Irish novel, a bildungsroman, a novel about the self-congratulatory failures of Northern Ireland’s political elite … [and a] sharp deconstruction of toxic masculinity * Times Literary Supplement *

Michael Magee is the fiction editor of the Tangerine and a graduate of the creative writing PhD programme at Queen’s University, Belfast. His writing has appeared in Winter Papers, The Stinging Fly, The Lifeboat and The 32- The Anthology of Irish Working-Class Voices. Close to Home is his first novel. It was shortlisted for the Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize 2023 and won the Rooney Prize for Literature 2023.

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