Close to Home

While growing up in West Belfast, Sean does every­thing he´s supposed to do. He works hard, he studies, and he - mostly - stays out of trouble. The thirty-year conflict is over, he´s told, and his future is lit with promise. But when Sean returns home from university, he finds much of the same-the same friends doing the same gear in the same clubs; the same lost broth­ers and mad fathers; the same closed doors; the same silences. There are no jobs, 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 assaults a stranger at a party, and everything begins to come undone. Close to Home begins with this sudden act of violence and expands into a startling portrait of working-class Ireland under the long shadow of the Troubles. It´s a first novel drawn from life, written with the immediacy of thought. It´s about what happens when men get desperate, about the cycles of loss and trauma and secrecy that keep them trapped, and about the struggle to get free.