Product Description

Ireland, 1971, John Egan is a misfit, 'a twelve year old in the body of a grown man with the voice of a giant who insists on the ridiculous truth'. With an obsession for the Guinness Book of Records and faith in his ability to detect when adults are lying, John remains hopeful despite the unfortunate cards life deals him. During one year in John's life, from his voice breaking, through the breaking-up of his home life, to the near collapse of his sanity, we witness the gradual unsticking of John's mind, and the trouble that creates for him and his family.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #60642 in Books
• Published on: 2007-03-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

JM Coetzee
'This is fiction writing of the highest order.'

Synopsis
Ireland, 1971, John Egan is a misfit, 'a twelve year old in the body of a grown man with the voice of a giant who insists on the ridiculous truth'. With an obsession for the "Guinness Book of Records" and faith in his ability to detect when adults are lying, John remains hopeful despite the unfortunate cards life deals him. During one year in John's life, from his voice breaking, through the breaking-up of his home life, to the near collapse of his sanity, we witness the gradual unsticking of John's mind, and the trouble that creates for him and his family.

About the Author
Prize-winning novelist M J Hyland was awarded the Hawthornden Prize and the Encore prize for her second novel Carry Me Down, and has been appointed to the Centre for New Writing at University of Manchester as a Lecturer in Creative Writing. Carry Me Down, which charts a year in the profoundly troubled family life of twelve-year-old John Egan in early 1970s Ireland, was also shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize. Her work has been acclaimed by the likes of Ali Smith, Hilary Mantel and J M Coetzee, who commented, 'This is fiction writing of the highest order.'

Customer Reviews

Dreadful
I bought this book after reading many great reviews.
Some of the content of the first few chapters made me feel ill, and after that the book went from horrible to boring.
There are very few books that I won't read right to the end (and I read 2-3 books a week) but there was no way I could finish this book.
I wouldn't recommend it at all !

Carry me off
I simply cannot understand the acclaim for this work. It is a perfectly acceptable and competent novel, no more. What it failed to do was involve me as a reader, I wanted to feel sympathy, anger, upset, anything. Maybe the author wanted the reader to feel as detached as the boy who is the centre of the work; in this case she did succeed in her task. This however does not make the book enjoyable. If the book had been a biography then you could forgive some of the lack of involvement but as a work of fiction you cannot.

Excellent, but...
This is an excellent novel, combining elements of Ireland's darkness and fragile state of mind on the scale of Pat McCabe, with acute social observation of the order of Sue Townsend.

However. I read this first and read MJ's 1st novel "How The Light Gets In" second and the similarities are uncanny. It almost ammounts to a thematic rewrite. Both novels are excellent but her third must really break free of these themes and this structure if she is not to risk derision.