Meet the first novel by a Galway writer who blogs about life on a council estate under a name so forceful I can't repeat it in a family newspaper. Meet also a terrific reading experience.
A man in a grubby jumper and frayed tracksuit pants lies with his head stoved in, on the kitchen floor of a city tenement. The unintended, unprofessional death starts a series of meltdowns in Cork's criminal underworld.
It also starts our acquaintance with a catalogue of figures drifting or smouldering below the radar of respectable life, in an Ireland wallowing through the trough of economic recession.
There's Ryan, the school drug dealer, mother dead, father a boozy wreck. Maureen, "face half-way to her ankles". Jimmy, captain of various illicit industries, but hard-pressed to handle the fact that his Mum has just killed someone with a rock carrying an image of the Virgin Mary. Deirdre, as mercenary as she's intellectually challenged. Marvellously many more.
Over the half-decade of the narrative, they trace not so much character arcs as character (and intermittently caricature) car-wrecks, amid the dislocation of a society where "the world had burst its banks and no one had anything in common with anyone any more".
