Close to Home

by Michael Magee

A big part of the satisfaction I found in judging in the Nero Book Awards debut fiction category last year was being able to help champion such a brilliant winner; I absolutely loved Close To Home.

It’s been a bit of a wait, but the paperback is now here, which is my cue to encourage as many of you as humanly possible to read it.

As is often the case with a really great book, it would be an injustice to summarise what it is about. A nuanced, complicated book such as this resists being reduced to a punchy headline encapsulation. 

Our narrator, Sean, has moved back to Belfast after studying literature at university. He is, once again, ensconced in his old mileu. He takes work, when he can find it, at bars and clubs, but tends not to last long. He is drinking too much, taking too many drugs, and generally losing any sense of outward momentum gained during his years of study out of Belfast. What follows is a crisis that has been long in building, through a young lifetime and the lifetimes of previous generations, with an explosive point of reckoning.

Magee is brilliant on the ways in which our relationship to a place can intertwine with our own sense of self, and how difficult they can be to disentangle. He draws us through the influences of political history, family history, mental health, poverty, precarity, and the ways in which they all swirl and intersect around the life of one young man. All of which is crucial to the book, but none of which would work were it not for the pitch perfect voice that Magee manages throughout. His characters are utterly believable, bringing dimension and complex humanity to every stage of the novel.

It is a thoroughly wonderful book, and I recommend it wholeheartedly.

We have a lovely stack of paperback copies now in the shop, and it can also be purchased from our website for home delivery.