The Butcher Boy

(Paperback)

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A modern classic of Irish fiction, shortlisted for the 1992 Booker Prize. When I was a young lad twenty or thirty or forty years ago I lived in a small town where they were all after me on account of what I done on Mrs Nugent. Francie Brady is a small-town rascal who spends his days turning a blind eye to the troubles at home and getting up to mischief with his best friend Joe - hiding in the chicken-house, shouting abuse at fish in the local stream. But after a disagreement with his neighbour Mrs Nugent over her son's missing comic books, Francie's reckless streak spirals out of control and gives rise to a monstrous obsession . . . Fearless, shocking and blackly funny, Patrick McCabe's The Butcher Boy won the 1992 Irish Times / Aer Lingus Literature Prize and was shortlisted for the 1992 Booker Prize. It is a modern classic of Irish fiction, a portrait of the insidious violence latent in small town life and of a frenzied young man lashing out at everyone, even himself. Now part of the Picador Collection, a series showcasing the very best of modern literature.

Reviews

Brilliant, unique . . . reading fiction will never be the same again -- Roddy Doyle
The most astonishing Irish novel for many years, a masterpiece * Sunday Independent *
The Butcher Boy takes Irish literature to a place it has never been before. Both familiar and extraordinary, it is the most significant novel to emerge from Ireland this decade -- Neil Jordan
An insidious, funny, breathtakingly horrific novel set in small-town Ireland, switching from mischief to madness as an adolescent obsession turns Dennis the Menace into Jack the Ripper * Observer *
An intense, disturbing and original novel . . . prose which races yet lets you miss nothing -- Alan Sillitoe
Compelling, unashamedly horrible, memorable and sensitive * Times Literary Supplement *

Author Bio

Patrick McCabe was born in Clones, County Monaghan, Ireland in 1955. He is the author of the children's story The Adventures of Shay Mouse, and the novels Music on Clinton Street, Carn, The Butcher Boy (winner of the Irish Times/Aer Lingus Literature Prize and shortlisted for the 1992 Booker Prize), The Dead School, Breakfast on Pluto (shortlisted for the 1998 Booker Prize), Mondo Desperando, Emerald Germs of Ireland and Call Me The Breeze. He lives in Sligo with his wife and two daughters.