Close to Home

Michael Magee

€ 19.99

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Winner of the Nero Book Award for Debut Fiction.

Sean is back in Belfast after university. He is the first in his family to attend, but the life-changing opportunities his degree promised have not materialised: he can’t find a job, he’s living hand to mouth and when he assaults a stranger at a party one night, his hopes for a different kind of life are jeopardised forever.

Told from Sean’s perspective and written in Belfast dialect, Close to Home immerses readers in Nationalist, working class Belfast life where the collective, generational trauma of ‘The Troubles’ still casts its shadow, and poverty and addiction feel as permanent as the mountains visible from Sean’s window.

Intense and urgent, Sean’s deadpan humour and Magee’s tenderness for his characters cut through the bleak circumstances to offer hope and redemption. Close to Home is strongly rooted in a particular place and time but Sean’s attempts to make sense of how and even if he still belongs in the community that raised him, and to discover what it means to be a man, are themes that resonate across cultures.