Well what a ride it has been. This year The Good Son was shortlisted for The Guardian’s Not The Booker Prize and selected as Best of 2015 by The Reading Agency, Wales Arts Review and ELLE Magazine.
This is me reading from the first chapter at Word Factory, filmed for the first time. It was quite an informal affair with lots of friends and colleagues in the audience, as you will see (I’m Associate Director at Word Factory).
I hope you enjoy it.
The Good Son is one of ELLE Magazine’s Best Books of the Year! along with Louise O’Neill, Benjamin Wood, Ali Smith and Kate Atkinson. Stoked!
“blackly hilarious… one of the most endearing, charming characters I’ve come across in a long while”
Howdy folks! The great news is that The Good Son has sold out and is going to a new print run – Huzzah! There aren’t many copies around. Amazon and my publishers Salt have sold out, as are Easons Bookshops in Northern Ireland.
There are some you can order from Waterstones bookshop in Piccadilly, Waterstones online and Blackwells online. And of course still available on your Kindle/Reader.
If you already have your copy you’re now in possession of the First Edition! Thanks for making The Good Son a big success.
Book blogger, reviewer, author and founder of The Green Carnation Prize, Simon Savidge, gives a wonderful review of The Good Son on his blog.
“The Good Son is such a brilliant book… unflinching rawness… something I have not experienced before and I thought it was marvellous. It also gives us hope.
McVeigh does many wonderful things with The Good Son and first and foremost of these is the character that he has created with Mickey. McVeigh excels in the use of light and shade within his writing… incredibly powerful… Whilst many novels of the Troubles would make them the main focus and give you them in all their rawest and most shocking detail, I think McVeigh gives you something far more clever and intricate… no word is wasted, no sentence unplanned… ”
You can read he whole interview by clipping the link at the top. You can also listen to my interview with Simon in his podcast ‘You Wrote The Book‘.
Canadian author Lauren B Davis choses ‘The Good Son’ as one of her 10 Best of 2015. I’m in very good company too- EL Doctorow, John Williams, Anthony Doerr… ! Thanks Lauren. Here’s a snippet.
“This book is astonishing. It’s hard to believe this is a first novel, it’s so good. A masterful combination of tragedy and humor, stirred into a batter of scathing social commentary. Paul McVeigh is a writer we’ll be hearing a great deal from in years to come.”
You can read the rest here.
I was asked by book blogger (and writer) Simon Savidge to take part in a podcast interview for his wonderful ‘You Wrote The Book’ site. There are interviews with excellent writers on there: Carys Davies, Helen MacDonald and Val McDermid. It was a real honour to be asked.
I’ll warn you I’m not the most inarticulate of men. I should stick to writing things down.
Simon asks great questions and you might enjoy listening to me stutter and stumble as I try to answer. Here you go.
Reading for Word Factory at Waterstones Piccadilly this week was a whole lot of fun. It was great to read alongside friends and colleagues. I can remember only a couple of years ago being so terrified I stopped reading and froze after just a few lines. Now I look like a pro.
The ceiling was bouncing from the music and dancing above and below there were readings from authors such as Booker Prize-winner Marlon James. Lots to distract and get nervous about.
I say look like a pro because I never feel like one. I think it’s all a confidence trick. Just pretend you’re a pro and see what happens. Readings can be funny things – a mixture of ‘can’t wait for my turn’ and ‘please let me disappear’. My legs were shaking so badly I had to keep shifting from my front leg to my back leg so they didn’t give way completely. I couldn’t stand still or both legs. On the other hand – or rather, the top half – I was giving it my all. If I’m totally honest I was showing off. I got lots of great feedback from people who had seen me read before and no-one noticed. Not one. That’ll do for me. And I really enjoyed it.
One great piece of advice you’re given is that when reading you should make an effort to look up from the page. It drives the energy out, the audience see more of your ‘performance’ and with some eye contact they become more engaged. And I just found out – by looking up you could catch some images like this… people really having a good laugh. Strong and genuine reactions to your work.
Thanks to James Lawson for the pics. A video of the reading is coming soon… yikes!
Another wonderful review of The Good Son, this time from Susie Wild in Bare Fiction Magazine. Read the whole thing by clicking the link.
‘A vivid, playful, fence-hurdling, page-turning act of cocky bravado and endearing imagination. Mickey is a shining star of a protagonist; charming, erudite, and warmly, infectiously funny.
…a startling debut, McVeigh proves he more than warrants the literary company he keeps. The writing is sharp and the voice, a difficult one to sustain over a novel’s length, rarely falters. With pages so full of heart and helter-skelter movement, it is no surprise to learn that he also has a background in theatre. The pages of his first novel are alive with sparky dialogue and this visual language, the brash and the subtle, the compelling, the compassionate.
An engaging storyteller, I hope to see more from Paul McVeigh…’
You can hear me read from The Good Son Thursday Dec 3 at Waterstones Piccadilly at 6.30. For tickets to the Word Factory salon at the Waterstones Xmas evening email piccadilly@waterstones.com .
You can listen back to the wonderful review of The Good Son on BBC Radio Ulster by Mike Philpott on the Kerry McLean Show at 42.15 mins in.
“Heart-rending… It has everything… the casual brutality of the Troubles seems worse because it’s seen through this child’s eyes. It’s so real, one the best protagonists I’ve read in a long, long time… The last time a character had stayed with me like that was Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye.
One of McVeigh’s talents is he takes you from sadness to humour to horror to a whole range of other emotions quite often even in the space of one page which is not an easy thing to do.”
Listeners:
“A bitter-sweet experience… One I’d reccomend to all.”
“Amazing, disturbing, sad and funny.”
“It’s the story of every child. I really enjoyed it but it did make me cry.”
“A cracking read. One I’d definitely recommend.”
Amazing! Thanks everyone.
Paul McVeigh 