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Irish Examiner
25-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Examiner
Summer books catch-up: 20 of the best novels so far in 2025
1. The Children of Eve by John Connolly There are few more enjoyable crime series characters than Detective Charlie Parker, John Connolly's former cop whose cases invariably find him knee-deep in the supernatural in picturesque Maine. This time out of the traps, he's tasked with finding an ex-soldier on the run who has apparently abducted the children of a mob boss. 2. Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way by Elaine Feeney Elaine Feeney is one of Ireland's most talented novelists. In her third novel, Claire, moves back from London to Athenry following her mother's death, needing to care for her dying father. When her old flame moves into a house close by, it opens up a pandora's box of personal and family drama. 3. Flesh by David Szalay Flesh is the sixth book from the Booker Prize nominee David Szalay. He writes brilliant, meandering novels. His latest story is about a teenage Hungarian boy whose life over the course of decades takes a downward spiral owing to misfortune. 4. Fun and Games by Patrick McHugh Patrick McHugh's debut novel – following on from a well-received short story collection, Pure Gold, in 2021 – has been hailed. It follows the tribulations of a 17-year-old boy on an island off the coast of Mayo over the summer of 2009, a time of romance and ambiguous friendship. 5. Stories of Ireland by Brian Friel If you're looking to pack something in your suitcase for holidays, look no further than Brian Friel's short story collection published this year by Penguin, which is in paperback and mercifully slim. Most of the 13 stories were published in the New Yorker in their day. Each one is a marvel. Patrick McHugh's Fun and Games; Eimear McBride's The City Changes its Face 6. The City Changes Its Face by Eimear McBride Eimear McBride's quasi-sequel to the brilliant The Lesser Bohemians re-unites us with the actors Eily, 20, and Stephen, 40. It's set in London in the mid-1990s. Stephen's teenage daughter has resurfaced. Something terrible has happened, which will have consequences. 7. Air by John Boyne Air is the fourth instalment in John Boyne's elements series (following on from Water, Earth, Fire), novellas which examine abuse in different circumstances. In Air, a father, 40, is 30,000 feet above ground, in a passenger plane, flying with his teenage son. Both are trying to mend their broken lives. 8. The Ghosts of Rome by Joseph O'Connor Joseph O'Connor returns to wartime Rome – scene for his previous novel, My Father's House, about wartime hero Monsignor Hugh O'Flaherty – for a second instalment. Again, the theme is about escape lines for refugees fleeing Nazi-occupied Europe, as Contessa Giovanna Landini, member of the activist group 'The Choir', tries to evade the unwanted attention of a Gestapo chief. 9. Twist by Colum McCann Colum McCann has a gift for storytelling. In Twist, Anthony Fennell, a journalist, in pursuit of a story to do with fibre optics, finds himself on board a boat off the west coast of Africa and in thrall to the ship's captain. When he disappears, Fennell goes hunting for him. John Boyne's Air; Emma Donoghue's The Paris Express 10. The Paris Express by Emma Donoghue The brilliant Emma Donaghue, author of Room and Oscar-nominated screenwriter of its movie adaptation, goes back in time to Paris in 1895 for her latest novel, a story inspired by the moments leading up to a fatal train crash, and the lives of several of the train's passengers. 11. Eden's Shore by Oisín Fagan Oisín Fagan's second novel has been acclaimed. His character Angel Kelly is a dreamer. In the late eighteenth century, he sets sail from Dublin, via Liverpool, intent on living in a commune in Brazil but ends up, unwittingly, in the middle of the slave trade, a mutiny and a colonial dispute, amongst other capers. 12. The Dark Hours by Amy Jordan Amy Jordan's crime novel, The Dark Hours, has been lauded by the New York Times. In 2024, Julia Harte, a retired Garda detective, gets a call from her old Superintendent. Two women have been murdered in Cork, in identical circumstances to a case she worked on 30 years earlier, forcing Julia to tackle some demons and hunt down a vicious serial killer. Amy Jordan's The Dark Hours; Patricia Scanlan's City Girls Forever 13. City Girls Forever by Patricia Scanlan The first three books in the City Girl series by the popular Patricia Scanlan were written in the 1990s. Dubliner Devlin Delaney and her best friends, Caroline and Maggie, return in middle age for more adventure and heartbreak, weighed down by their blended families, aging parents and sibling rivalries, but buoyed by friendship. Some of This is True by Michelle McDonagh 14. Some of This Is True by Michelle McDonagh On a January morning, a body is discovered at the bottom of the Wishing Steps at Blarney Castle. The mother of the dead tourist girl, who came to Ireland looking for her father, travels over from Boston. She's convinced her daughter's death wasn't an accident, setting in train an investigation that divides the local community. 15. The Bureau by Eoin McNamee The Bureau is perhaps Eoin McNamee's most personal novel yet, as it features his father as a central character in the action. It's a story of love and death during the Troubles in Northern Ireland, set along the border involving the vivacious Lorraine and Paddy, who's caught up in smuggling and money-laundering. Cork Fiction Highlights William Wall's Writers Anonymous; Catherine Ryan Howard's Burn after Reading 1. Writers Anonymous by William Wall: During the pandemic lockdown in 2020, Jim, an Irish novelist, organises an anonymous online writers group to pass the time. Things get messy when one of the writers starts drip-feeding him details about the suspicious death of Jim's childhood friend, which draws the reader back into the teenage world of a seaside Irish village in 1980 and a crime that must be resolved. A magnificent mystery novel. 2. Camarade by Theo Dorgan: Poet and writer Theo Dorgan has just released a philosophical thriller. A teenager abandons his life in Cork, having killed a policeman in a revenge plot. He flees to Paris, during a time of tumult, May '68 and camaraderie. Several decades later, he begins writing his memoir, which forces him to address the seminal event in his life. 3. Burn After Reading by Catherine Ryan Howard: Catherine Ryan Howard's novels are always page-turners. In Burn After Reading, Emily, a ghostwriter, gets a gig working on the book of a possible murderer who might be about to admit his guilt. Emily harbours her own secret, one of many twists in this tale. Catherine Kirwan's The Seventh Body; Louise Hegarty's Fair Play 4. The Seventh Body by Catherine Kirwan: Excavation comes to a halt on a Cork building site when six bodies are discovered. Therein lie the remnants of men from centuries ago. When the remains of a seventh person, a female less cold in the grave, emerges, a historical find turns into a murder case Detective Garda Alice McCann is desperate to solve, despite interference from her superiors. 5. Fair Play by Louise Hegarty: Louise Hegarty grew up in Glanmire, Co Cork. In her debut novel, a group of friends gather on New Year's Eve 2022 to celebrate Benjamin's birthday with a murder mystery-themed party. Friendships and affairs blossom and fray as the night unfolds. In the morning, they wake to find Benjamin is dead and so begins the real murder mystery investigation. Next week: 20 non-fiction tips
Irish Times
01-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Fun and Games by John Patrick McHugh: highly promising debut by a big talent
Fun and Games Author : John Patrick McHugh ISBN-13 : 978-0008517342 Publisher : Fourth Estate Guideline Price : £16.99 John Patrick McHugh's first novel begins with a teenage boy and a teenage girl, alone in the woods on a summer afternoon, engaging in what puritanical educators used to call 'heavy petting'. 'His finger was burrowing inside her. They were kissing and then they were doing this. He was the horniest, he was seventeen.' The scene is a tease, in several senses. Neither boy nor girl at this point get anywhere, so to speak ('My arm's gone dead'). And the unwary reader is led by such an overture to expect from Fun and Games a comedy about the squirm-inducing hopes and humiliations of teenage sexuality, in the vein of Martin Amis's The Rachel Papers or the TV series The Inbetweeners. But this isn't at all what Fun and Games is up to. To begin with, more than 100 pages pass before we get another sex scene – though, of course, like the teenagers we're reading about, we keep fruitlessly expecting one. The book's viewpoint character, in whose company and consciousness we spend a chunky 390 pages, is John Masterson, who is in the middle of his 'pivotal' post-Leaving Cert summer. The year is 2009. John lives on an island off the coast of Mayo. He hangs out with the lads (Rooney, Studzy), and works shifts in the local hotel restaurant, the Island Head. He has been freshly called up as half-back for the local senior Gaelic team. The girl in the woods is Amber, who also works in the hotel restaurant. Amber is 19 and appears to John's gauche male gaze enigmatic to the point of impenetrability. Will they? Won't they? [ 'It's a very hard time to be young': author John Patrick McHugh on male adolescence Opens in new window ] This is very familiar material. But the contemporary Irish novel that Fun and Games might most closely remind you of is Louise Kennedy's Trespasses , another novel that takes a suite of apparently familiar characters and a bog-standard narrative framework and subjects them to intense pressures of empathy and perception in order to produce something luminous, a carefully fashioned object. Which is to say that McHugh is no mere grey stenographer of middling provincial dreams but a stylist, a shaper of the world in prose. READ MORE Like all beginning stylists, he has his ascensions and his wobbles. But when he's good, he's great. More or less the first thing we hear about John's mother, Yvonne, is that a private photograph texted to her illicit lover has done the rounds of the whole island. Here's John's reaction: 'He had studied his mother's tits. Much like any milfy duo obtained from the internet – fingertip nipples, blue veins etched like lightning bolts – but devastatingly his mother's. John hated her, and the whole Masterson family, and for a time everyone alive.' 'Milfy duo' is good – perhaps a tiny bit too good, actually – but it's the adverb, 'devastatingly,' and the rueful retrospection of 'for a time everyone alive' that bumps this particular riff up into a space above mere cringe comedy. Here is McHugh's method in miniature: the prose fireworks are almost always at the service of the book's large project, which is to use the resources of a tightly curbed irony to usher us into the mind of a young man who doesn't yet know how to be in the world. More gorgeous touches: the 'blemished cotton' of roadside sheep; John's conception of having a future at all is 'The wrong shape, like the plug sockets in Spain'; of a local girl: 'Her mother was from somewhere not Ireland'; on the ways in which the ambient culture finds its way into your mind: 'A yellow-reg zoomed by and John thought, passively: English wanker'; a drunk John tries to express his anger: 'it was hard to fully recall the intricacies to why John was so in the correct'; a joint, burning, is 'gold, apricot'. Also remarkable is that Fun and Games is unapologetically and prismatically about being a heterosexual teenage boy: ashamed of your constant horniness, finding the remarks of women completely baffling, discovering genuinely meaningful forms of physical expression out on the pitch with the other lads, wanking over classical paintings when nothing else is available, fretting about your body more or less exactly as young women do (preparing for a night out, John inquires of his friends, 'And I don't look fat, do I?'), McHugh renders with pointillist care John's inner and outer worlds, until the character stands clear. It isn't perfect. It's too long. It veers too thoroughly away from the dangers and rewards of opening out into other minds, other worlds. There is a sense that this big talent, first time out, has bitten off slightly less than it can chew. Next time, I suspect, things will be different. In the meantime, here is a first novel by a writer with gifts to spare. Kevin Power is associate professor of literary practice in the School of English, Trinity College Dublin
Irish Times
27-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
‘It's a very hard time to be young': author John Patrick McHugh on male adolescence
'It's a mad way of being, adolescence,' says Galway writer John Patrick McHugh. 'Sometimes I think I'd love to do it again and then I think of the stress of being a 14-year-old and how bad you can feel and I'm glad it's over.' McHugh has hit zeitgeist gold with his debut novel, Fun and Games. 'It's a really tough time,' says McHugh, now 33, of male adolescence, the subject of his novel. 'I can't imagine what it's like to do it now with internet and phones because curating your life for an outsider's perspective is an awful way to live.' We're in a coffee shop in Galway's west end, a suitably hip location for such a vaunted young writer as McHugh (The Observer anointed him one of their Best Debut Novelists of 2025). Fun and Games is freighted with the most treacherous of teenage landmines – sex-related public humiliation, loss of face, sporting competition and enough insecurity to sink a ship. The book begins with its protagonist, also called John, who has recently earned the nickname Tits thanks to a naked selfie of his mother that has been circulating the small island where he lives. It's the perfect entry point into the crucible of male adolescence. READ MORE McHugh wanted to be brutally honest about adolescence. 'I read coming-of-age novels and thought, That's not what I went through. I didn't drink red wine, you know, I drank Buckfast,' he says, laughing. 'I was interested in exploring that and I hadn't seen it for my generation. I wanted to get into it. I wanted to show masculinity, and youth, as raw as I could.' I didn't want [my characters] to be these macho silent boys. They do love each other — McHugh on Fun and Games McHugh has written about the subject of male adolescence before, both in personal essays and in his 2021 collection of short stories, Pure Gold . In fact, two of the characters, along with the island setting, already appeared in a short story in Pure Gold, although McHugh says they are different characters in the novel. He says he wanted to be honest about the kind of insecurities young men and boys struggle with. One striking aspect of the book is its exploration of negative male body image, something McHugh himself experienced as a teenager. 'I was always a big guy. I was overweight when I was eight, nine, 10 ... and that complex has always stayed with me. I'm sure weight issues were way more common than I thought. I'm sure I'm not the only one who never wanted to take off their shirt, but it was never talked about ... I remember being very frightened about being overweight, very worried about it. It affected me. It was tough. I played sports and I still had that fear of taking off your shirt, showing your body. I think it's natural and it's hard.' He sees teenagers now in the gym, and is conflicted about the focus on sculpting bodies. 'A part of me is like, fair play, but another part of me is like, you're 15 or 16, have fun, don't worry about this. It's a very hard time to be young, and I know this is a trite example, but Instagram is so fake. The things you see there are lies, and yet you see them as if they're truth, and your idea of what's good is messed up by these mirages.' [ John Patrick McHugh: Maeve Binchy, Lenin and me Opens in new window ] He wrote about his own teenage issues around body image for the Stinging Fly, in which he described going so far as to make himself sick after eating. 'Thankfully it wasn't destructive. It wasn't an everyday thing.' While the book is full of humour – much of it linked to the all-consuming goal of divesting oneself of one's virginity – it also offers a heart-rending insight into the fragility and insecurities of young Irish men. While sex is at the fore of the book, male friendship and love are at its heart. His description of how young men express their love for each other in the absence of the ability to express that love verbally is very skilfully done. Does he think not being able to talk about things is a problem among young men? 'I didn't want [my characters] to be these macho silent boys. They do love each other and have affection for each other and they'd go to war for each other and yet they are also incredibly cruel to each other and to other people, and yet they're also self-conscious. Male friendship is very interesting to me because it's so dramatic. Boys don't talk to each other for months and then one small apology and they're back being best friends. Those hysterics of masculinity are so interesting to me – the love at the heart of it. Boys get really intimate and touchy-feely with each other when they're drunk, or even just having a good time, or in sports, that comes into it too. I did talk to my friends about heartache and stuff like that. They were stilted conversations but they were still conversations, and there was an arm around the shoulder.' As much as the book is about the male experience, it also has some intriguing female characters, including Amber, John's sort-of girlfriend, and his mother, Yvonne, of the selfie infamy. In her determined and unashamed pursuit of her own passions (among them a brilliantly specific passion for painting pictures of elves and gnomes) she acts as a foil to the boys' extreme anxieties about expressing their individuality. 'I wanted to get as close to the bone of what peer pressure and social order can do to a boy, how wobbly it can make him in terms of how he views women as a result of that.' In the book John worries a lot about what people think of him, to the extent that he is willing to sabotage his own happiness for peer approval. 'John is riddled with social fear, and what people think about him – what do people think of his mother, what does the manager think of him in GAA, what does Amber think, what do his friends think. One of the hardest things about being a teenager is being able to say I am who I am, which is a really powerful and brave thing to do, and sometimes it doesn't happen for people until their twenties, thirties or forties.' I loved the Beano and Captain Underpants. I wasn't reading Tolstoy when I was 12 He says his character is an insecure, frustrated guy. 'I'd like to think at heart he's a good guy but he is someone who lashes out and does things that hurt people because he fears the boys. That hierarchy of who's number one is so pronounced in secondary school and you don't want to be near the bottom.' Much of this ranking is sorted out through sporting prowess. When John and his friends aren't vying for dominance in the sexual arena, they are competing for a spot on the senior Gaelic football team (McHugh himself played the sport), and almost as much of the book's disappointment, passion and heartache takes place on the pitch as it does in teenage bedrooms. McHugh grew up in Cork, moving around a lot because of his father's work in the bank, before the family returned to Galway and settled there when he was 12. Unusually for a writer, he didn't harbour childhood dreams of literary greatness. 'I loved the Beano and Captain Underpants,' he says, laughing. 'I wasn't reading Tolstoy when I was 12. I was reading the things you're meant to read. Being a writer was never in my sphere. I never thought that was a path for me even though I loved English and writing essays.' When it came to choosing a degree, he opted for a then-new course in NUI Galway, BA Connect with Creative Writing. On his first day of class he felt out of his depth. When asked what his favourite novel was, he said The Witches by Roald Dahl. 'Shocking,' he says with a laugh, before adding, 'It is a great book.' He learned discipline from the mentorship of writers such as Mike McCormack and he has also taken an applied MA in creative writing at the University of East Anglia and an MFA in creative writing at UCD. [ Sally Rooney and John Patrick McHugh at Cúirt festival Opens in new window ] He hasn't started work on his next novel yet but says there will be one, and when it is ready he has a crack team of some of the best writers in Ireland to critique it. When McHugh was an aspiring writer in his twenties, Thomas Morris, then editor of the Stinging Fly, put him in touch with a few other young writers who were also trying to write in a serious way. That group included Sally Rooney, Nicole Flattery and Michael Magee, among others. 'Sally's a wonderful person so we just became really good friends,' he says. 'The same with Mickey and Nicole. I think Tom put us together because he knew we were serious. I didn't get published again for another three or four years. I'm thinking now: How did I get the confidence? I think it helped to have that group with whom I could exchange work. I look back at that time and think wow, fair play, we stuck at it, we did it, you know. Sally is still the person I share work with, and her success is unbelievable. Irish writing in general inspires me. I think we're so good.' Fun and Games is published by 4th Estate
Irish Times
25-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Jane Casey and Stuart Neville shortlisted
In The Irish Times this Saturday, John Patrick McHugh tells Edel Coffey about his debut novel, Fun and Games. And there is a Q&A with Lisa Harding about her latest novel, The Wildelings. Reviews are Oliver Farry on The Great Betrayal: The Struggle for Freedom and Democracy in the Middle East Fawaz A Gerges; Karlin Lillington on Careless People: A Story of Where I Used to Work by Sarah Wynn-Williams; Daniel McLaughlin on Life in Spite of Everything by Victoria Donovan; Edel Coffey on The Marriage Vendetta by Caroline Madden; Frank Wynne on the best new fiction in translation; John Boyne on Ordinary Saints by Niamh Ní Mhaoileoin; Daniel Geary on Good Trouble: The Selma, Alabama and Derry, Northern Ireland Connection 1963-1972 by Forest Issac Jones; Ray Burke on Becoming Irish American by Timothy J Meagher; Helen Cullen on The Wildelings by Lisa Harding; Paraic O'Donnell on Open, Heaven by Seán Hewitt; and Kevin Power on Fun and Games by John Patrick McHugh. This weekend's Irish Times Eason offer is The Heart in Winter by Kevin Barry, just €5.99, a €6 saving. Eason offer Jane Casey and Stuart Neville have been longlisted for the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year 2025. Casey has been recognised for A Stranger in the Family and Neville for Blood Like Mine. Also shortlisted is Birmingham Irish author Marie Tierney for Deadly Animals. READ MORE Three former winners are vying for top honours at this year's Awards, including 2023 champion M.W. Craven, who is longlisted for his adrenaline-fuelled US-set thriller The Mercy Chair, alongside Chris Whitaker for All the Colours of the Dark, a million-copy bestseller exploring the aftermath of a childhood kidnapping, and Chris Brookmyre for the highly original thriller, The Cracked Mirror, which sees a hard-bitten homicide detective and an old lady who has solved multiple murders in her sleepy village, crack an impossible case. Highly commended in 2023, Elly Griffiths receives an impressive tenth longlisting for The Last Word, a murder mystery set at a writers' retreat. Readers are now encouraged to vote for their favourite novels to reach the shortlist, with the winner crowned on the opening night of the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival in Harrogate on July 17th. * Tickets for the Belfast Book Festival are now on sale with a packed programme of poetry, fiction, crime writing, journalism, screenwriting, plus developmental opportunities and expert-led discussions and workshops. The 15th edition of the Festival will run from June 5th-12th at The Crescent Arts Centre in south Belfast. Highlights include Game of Thrones star Kristain Nairn and his new book that documents life on the set of one of the world's most popular TV shows, Sam McAlister former BBC Newsnight producer and author of Scoops: Behind the Scenes of the BBC's Most Shocking Interviews, as well as many other author events from Joseph O'Connor, Wendy Erskine, Tessa Hadley, Eimear McBride, Luke Harding, Darran Anderson, Eoin McNamee, Roddy Doyle, Andrea Carter, Neil Hegarty, Noreen Masud, Claire Lynch, Roisin O'Donnell, Jan Carson, Gráinne O'Hare and Thomas Morris among others. As ever, there will be a celebration of emerging talent with the announcement of the Mairtín Crawford Awards. Festival commemorative events will honour Michael Longley and Edna O'Brien. Art lovers should check out The Art of Translation, the festival's exhibition that offers a fantastic snapshot of international book design via leading Irish writers, presented in collaboration with Literature Ireland. Tickets can be be found at * The Shaking Bog festival hosts a one-day programme of events in the Glencree Valley, Co Wicklow, on May 17th, featuring a Dawn Chorus Walk with Sean Ronayne, Moth Magic with Ciarán Finch, Exploring the River Valley with Martha Burton, Wildflowers & Pollinators with Prof Jane Stout, 'What is Wild?' a talk by Mark Cocker and in conversation with Ella McSweeney, and a Concert & Reading with Jane Robinson, Lynda O'Connor & Ailbhe McDonagh. Booking is essential - The Shaking Bog Festival is embarking on a new project. Entitled Riverscapes, this creative exploration of place, heritage and nature will run from May to October. Riverscapes is a place-based initiative which will celebrate, enliven and inform the communities of both people and nature that live in and around the Glencree and Dargle Rivers. And, in turn, share this experience with the wider world. The Riverscapes project will culminate with a new film by acclaimed local film-maker Alan Gilsenan - that will not only draw on the people and habitats of this richly diverse community but will also belong to that community. It is a film that will hopefully reflect life at its most local whilst also mirroring the universal. * Penguin, Sandycove is to publish Andy Farrell's autobiography, The Only Way I Know, on October 16th. Publisher Michael McLoughlin said : " Andy Farrell is rightly seen on these islands as one of the most remarkable sports people and coaches of all time. He has played and been hugely successful in both rugby codes and as a successful coach he has brought the Ireland team to the top of the world rankings and to consecutive Six Nations championship titles. The Lions tour to Australia this summer, under his leadership, will hopefully be another highlight. I am delighted to publish this book, which is as stellar as his career." Farrell said: 'It has been a really interesting and enjoyable process reflecting on my life and career, and working with Gavin Mairs to bring it all together. I have tried to be honest and true to myself, and I hope that is reflected in the book.' * For the third consecutive year, Denis Shaughnessy, writing under the pseudonym Marco Ocram, has won First Prize for Humour at the Chanticleer International Book Awards (CIBA) in the United States. This literary hat-trick crowns Ocram's 'Awful Truth' series of metafictional satires. Each of the three novels has now won the top prize in the humour category, a rare feat in the world of indie and international publishing. 'I was thrilled to win once, amazed to win twice, and by the third time I thought perhaps the judges needed checking,' joked Shaughnessy. 'But really, it's an honour to see readers and critics connect with something so deliberately absurd.' The awards, held annually in Washington state, draw thousands of entries from across the globe, celebrating excellence in independent and small press publishing. * Waterford Council is running the annual Molly Keane Creative Writing Award. This is a short story competition in memory of the Irish author. The stories must be 2,000 words or less, and entries must be in by noon on May 19th. Entries are only accepted via this link . * The Dublin Small Press Fair has opened a call for applications from publishers of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, experimental literature, literary journals, artists' books, zines, chapbooks, broadsides, and more. The first annual fair, organised by Tim Groenland and Éireann Lorsung, will take place over two days in November in Pearse Street Library (with support from Dublin Unesco City of Literature). The fair will celebrate small-scale publishing in Ireland as well as welcoming small presses from abroad, showcasing the innovative and experimental work of small literary presses while providing a space of connection in which publishers can share knowledge and develop relationships. It will feature readings, launches, panels, and exhibitions alongside many tables of books and book-adjacent work from about thirty small and independent presses, journals, book binders, zine makers, and more. Applications are free, and the deadline is July 1st. See for more information. * John Connolly, Marita Conlon-McKenna and Elaine Feeney, will be interviewed over three separate evenings in Kennys Bookshop, Galway in May, to celebrate the launch of their new books. Tickets are available now on On May 1st, crime fiction writer John Connolly will be interviewed about his new novel, The Children of Eve, the latest instalment in his bestselling Charlie Parker series. On May 15th, Marita Conlon-McKenna will be launching her Children of The Famine Trilogy of novels (Under the Hawthorn Tree, Wildflower Girl and Fields of Home), published in one volume for the very first time! She will be joined in conversation by bookseller and author Gráinne O'Brien. Award-winning Galway poet and novelist Elaine Feeney will be launching her new novel, Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way on May 27th in conversation with Sarah Kenny. Feeney's previous novel How to Build a Boat was longlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize. Tickets are free but limited. To book, visit * Marty Whelan will launch Killester: from medieval manor to garden suburb by Joseph Brady & Ruth McManus on Tuesday, April 29th at 7.30pm in Killester Donnycarney Football Club, Hadden Park, Killester, Dublin 5. * The Seamus Heaney HomePlace has launched its summer programme. Highlights include comedian Frank Skinner in conversation with Belfast-based poet Scott McKendry on June 27th talking about his love of poetry, as evidenced in his acclaimed Poetry Podcast which is now in its tenth series. On August 10th, Kabosh Theatre Company presents Julie - a new one-woman play written and performed by Charlotte McCurry. Set in West Belfast in 1981, it follows a teenage girl as she navigates the loss of her sister and her family's struggle for justice. Author events include Eimear McBride (May 29th); Nathan Thrall (June 2nd); Glenn Patterson (10th); Paul Lynch (14th); On June 25th, Patterson welcome this year's Seamus Heaney Centre Fellows, author Jan Carson, poet Fiona Benson, and screenwriters Adam Patterson and Declan Lawn (Blue Lines) for what promises to be a lively conversation, offering insight into the lives and work of these four exceptional writers. The 160th birthday of WB Yeats on June 13th is marked with a performance of Sailing to Byzantium, original songs set to 12 of Yeats's poems, performed by Christine Toibin. Following a sell-out performance last year, Ruairi Conaghan returns with his one-man show Lies Where It Falls on June 19th. Finally, on August 30th, HomePlace presents a storytelling brunch: Cloak of Wisdom, featuring Liz Weir, Vicky McParland and Anne Harper.
The Guardian
16-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Fun and Games by John Patrick McHugh review
I wouldn't wish the pains of being a 17-year-old boy on my worst enemy. The awkward longing, the spots, the insecurity: it's enough to cringe yourself into oblivion. For John Patrick McHugh, however, it is a rich seam to squeeze – not only for humour, but for a nuanced examination of burgeoning masculinity. John Masterson, the main character of McHugh's debut novel, is in the limboland of a post-exams summer, playing football and hooking up with a slightly older colleague at the hotel where he has a part-time job. In this way, Fun and Games stalks the same emotional and geographical territory as McHugh's 2021 short-story collection, Pure Gold, also set on an island off the Irish mainland in County Mayo, and also knee-deep in the turmoil of young lads, painted with tenderness and menace in equal measure. Here, though, we are pinned specifically in time, in the summer of 2009. It's an age of pre-smartphone texts, with low-res images pinging from pocket to pocket. One image in particular has caused John no small share of distress. Prior to the events of the novel, his mother's breasts 'floated around the Island' – a wonderfully lyrical image to describe a sext gone wrong. John's dad has moved out as a result, and John has acquired the nickname 'Tits' from his male friends. I say friends, but the borders between amity and enmity are at the heart of the novel, particularly in the relationship between John and his supposed best friend, Studzy. Studzy, John and a couple of other boys in his year have been accepted on to the island's senior Gaelic football team. They find themselves among adult men, and their jostling to place themselves within the group as they move towards the championship forms one of two main threads to Fun and Games. The other is John's relationship with his 19-year-old colleague, Amber. The pair have already begun a tentative sexual relationship, although the prospect of full intercourse is what motivates John to keep it going through the summer. 'Sex was a league table,' the narrator tells us, and achieving victory is a toxic little engine that powers John's motivations in a way that's all the more shocking for being understated. John's shifting feelings for Amber, and how they play into wider power dynamics in his life, form the emotional and dramatic core of the book. There are some deliciously agonising scenes of laboured texting and tension at the hotel as the lovers navigate the uncertainties of their relationship. But it's the male relationships that are most vivid: the complex bullying and reliance on each other, nuanced and knotty. John's mixed feelings for Studzy, who is more athletic, more outgoing, but less academic and, it is implied, poorer, raise questions of class. How does dominance in one kind of game stack up against the opportunities provided by wealth in the broader social arena? John feels protective of Studzy at the same time as being pushed around by him, a capricious balance of masculine forces that changes as their wider group teeter on a world beyond Leaving Cert results. When these elements come together, the novel excels. A particularly tense scene between John, Amber and a manipulative Studzy is a standout. It's a shame, then, that the final third somewhat loses its nerve in challenging that central triangle, in favour of letting other narrative threads play out more or less as expected. Amber also at times comes across more as a vehicle for testing John's desires and prejudices than as a rounded character in her own right. But McHugh layers John's mind with care. For example, during a practice match in the July sun, we're told that 'the ball was rimmed violently, then blurred to a mauve colour, then hoary, and then it was that familiar white once more'. Later we learn of John's interest in art history, his feeling for colour and light; a meeting of perspective and character that McHugh handles deftly. John's way of seeing the world is shown to be sensitive, impressionable to others, challenged as our teenage protagonist faces the consequences of his actions. 'Until someone gets hurt' may be the implied response to the novel's title, and indeed there are pains aplenty in the agonies of John's late adolescence. But in McHugh's hands there is also warmth and sensitivity, and a skilful humour that sends up the rituals of a schoolboy's final summer while shining light on the cruelty and vulnerability of young men. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion Fun and Games by John Patrick McHugh is published by 4th Estate (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
