My Coney Island Baby

(Paperback)

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An exquisite, heart-breaking novel about the end of an affair by an new Irish voice 'A poignant, piercing meditation on middle age and the passing of time. will linger with you long after the book is closed' Guardian *SHORTLISTED FOR THE ENCORE AWARD 2020* On a bitterly cold winter's afternoon, Michael and Caitlin escape their unhappy marriages to keep an illicit rendezvous. Once a month, for the past quarter of a century, Coney Island has been their haven; these precious, hidden hours their only nourishment. But now, amid the howling of an angry snowstorm, the shut-down, out-of-season resort feels like the edge of the world. And their lives, suddenly, are on the brink - with news of serious illness on one side, and a move to the Midwest on the other.

Reviews

Novel of the year is My Coney Island Baby, by Billy OCallaghan, a lush, precise, poetic account of a love affair that ends the way most love affairs do. We knew OCallaghan to be a master of the short story, and here he shows the grand reach of his powers as a novelist. -- John Banville * Irish Times *Books of the Year* *
Billy OCallaghans new novel grips from the opening page. The stride of his sentences is long and powerful, his vision raw. A spectrum of intensities from grief to love is revealed as relationships unfold with an honesty that is utterly believable. -- Bernard MacLaverty
OCallaghan [has made a] significant achievement in this fine novel Good books remind us of other good books and in its treatment of adultery this one calls to mind thematic ancestors such as Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina and The Scarlet Letter. -- Bert Wright * Sunday Times *
A poignant, piercing meditation on middle age and the passing of time these characters will linger with you long after the book is closed. -- Claire Kilroy * Guardian *
Quiet, subtle and deeply moving This is a fine novel, with elegance and wisdom lying beneath an unpretentious surface and OCallaghan, a gifted writer, has managed to do that most difficult of things: take a quiet, almost everyday story and transform it into a thing of beauty. -- John Boyne * Irish Times *

Author Bio

Billy O'Callaghan is the author of the critically acclaimed novel My Coney Island Baby, which has been translated into nine languages and was shortlisted for the Encore Award 2020. Stories in his short-story collection The Boatman and Other Stories were shortlisted for the Costa Short Story Award and for Writie.ie Short Story of the Year in the An Post Irish Book Awards. He lives in Douglas, a village on the edge of Cork City.