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Vendor
Fritz Agency
Christian Dittus
Original language
English
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SCENES OF A GRAPHIC NATURE

Caroline O'Donoghue

A darkly comic novel about a young woman going back to her Irish roots and digging up secrets.
Charlie is going back to her roots.

Her career as a film writer is on standby, she hasn't had a girlfriend in forever, her best friend is sickeningly successful (and being awkward since that night) and her dad is dying of cancer. So the invitation from Cork Film Festival comes like a sign - a chance to explore the Irish homeland she's never seen. Her father survived a tragic accident that killed every other child on the small island where he grew up, and Charlie's one achievement is the film she made that tells his story.

It's only when she arrives in Ireland that she fears his story may have been a lie.
The site of the tragedy yields suspicious clues. The friendly locals turn hostile. And what felt like her heritage - her home - starts to become a trap.

With a sharp eye and sour tongue, Caroline O'Donoghue delivers a delicious contemporary fable of prodigal return. Blisteringly honest, funny and moving, it grapples with Irishness, authenticity, and how to define yourself when you don't know your own history.
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Book

Published 2020-06-01 by Virago

Comments

[...] O'Donoghue is impressive on the complexities of being a young woman and delivers this insight with lively dialogue and a droll acuity ... O'Donoghue possesses an edginess and a wry sensibility that, despite the book's dark subject matter, ultimately translates into something zesty and companionable. Her easy curiosity about love, lust, loss and losing one's way will doubtless leave readers wanting more. Read more...

[...] O'Donoghue's prose is witty and original and she has a real gift for description. This is a gorgeous exploration of the messy and fragile nature of friendship and all the many forms of love, as well as of the primal need we all have to belong. Read more...

[...] Where O'Donoghue nails it is in her writing about women who make art, female collaboration, and identity. Here she is witty, tender and insightful, especially on the way oppression bleeds its way through the generations. Read more...