The Good Son

25/26 Nov, Shrewsbury Literature Festival

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I’m looking forward to the first Shrewsbury Literature Festival. On the Friday 25th November I’ll be interviewing Jonathan Coe about his new novel Number 11 in the festival’s first ever event. Here’s the info…

“Jonathan Coe is SFL’s first Patron and we are delighted that he will be with us over the Festival weekend. He is the author of numerous novels, including “What a Carve Up!”, “The Rotters’ Club” and the Shropshire-based “The Rain before It Falls“.

Jonathan was born in Birmingham and spent many happy childhood holidays in Shropshire. He tells us that he is looking forward to returning to Shrewsbury for the festival in November.

Jonathan’s latest novel is “Number 11” and he will be discussing this book and many other things with the writer, Paul McVeigh, in our very first event!”

On Saturday 26th November I’ll be running a writing workshop and then reading from and talking about The Good Son at 5pm.

I hope to see some of you there.

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 The Good Son:Currently Shortlisted for The Polari Prize
Appearances: Kildare Readers Festival with Lisa McInerney, Oct 15
Wivenhoe Bookshop with AL Kennedy, Oct 29
Outburst Festival Belfast, Nov 14
German Tour: Olpe, Nov 15/Munich, Nov 16/Regendburg, Nov 17/Hamburg, Nov 18
Shrewsbury Literature Festival: Nov 25/26

 

 

 

Glorious Debuts with Lisa McInerney

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I can’t wait to read with Lisa McInerney again at Kildare Readers Festival, Riverbank Arts Centre, October 14 at 8pm. We met last year at Cork World Book Festival and got on like a house on fire. She is so funny and an all-round lovely person.

me and Quack

Lisa McInerney and me

 

We met again when Lisa read at a fundraiser I organised in Jan 2016 for KAVA Arts in Kinvara.

Group

Nuala O’Connor, Sarah Clancy, Lisa McInerney and me

Since then Lisa has had enormous success winning the Desmond Elliott Prize and the Bailey’s Prize.

We love each other’s work and Lisa wrote an amazing essay on The Good Son for The Irish Times when it was the Book Club Choice for July this year. We’re also good buddies and the craic we have should lead to an excellent event at Kildare Readers Festival.

Hope to see some of you there.

 

 

 

Review of The Good Son

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Review of The Good by Gregory Hayman on his blog

I saw this on Facebook and had to share it.

“The book is well crafted with a poetic (in all senses of the word) that infuses every line.”

And the mind-blowing…

“…there is in McVeigh the possibility of becoming the new Edmund White, but a White for the twenty-first century and McVeigh’s sense of restraint in his writing together with a refusal to sentimentalise casts him as a potential literary force to be reckoned with.”

Click here to read the full review.

 

Currently shortlisted for The Polari Prize
Chosen as Brighton’s City Reads 2016
Shortlisted: The Guardian’s ‘Not The Booker’ Prize
Shortlisted: The Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award
Finalist for The People’s Book Prize
ELLE Magazine Best Books of 2015

The Good Son makes Polari Prize Shortlist

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The Good Son Makes The Polari Prize Shortlist

The Good Son has made The Polari Prize shortlist. Exciting!

You can read all about it here.

The Chair of the judges, Paul Burston, wrote a wonderful article in The Irish Times about Mickey Donnelly that I found very moving.

“There aren’t a great many sexually ambiguous, sassy, 10-year-old Irish narrators in literature. So thank heavens for Mickey Donnelly. From the moment we first meet him, we know that Mickey is a mammy’s boy. But there’s more to it than that. To his older brother Paddy, he’s a “wee gay boy” and “a fucking weirdo”. To the kids who play on the mean streets where he lives, he’s a “fruity boy” who acts “like a girl”. The boys bully him. The girls tease him. Even Mickey’s Aunt Kathleen worries about the way he behaves. “Do you think he’s…” she asks, before Mickey’s mother cuts her off. Not even a doting mammy wants to consider the possibility of her wee boy turning out like that.”

“What emerges from this novel isn’t just a portrait of the outsider as a young Irishman. It’s also a testament to the strength of character required by gay children simply to survive. Mickey may be effeminate but he’s certainly not weak. He’s kind, loving and sometimes an eejit. He’s also cunning and far more courageous than any 10-year-old boy should need to be. He might not have his “man’s voice” yet, but he’s the only one man enough to take care of his mother.”

Read it all here. It’s really special.

 

New Book Cover

Currently shortlisted for The Polari Prize
Chosen as Brighton’s City Reads 2016
Shortlisted: The Guardian’s ‘Not The Booker’ Prize
Shortlisted: The Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award
Finalist for The People’s Book Prize
ELLE Magazine Best Books of 2015

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Talented Mickey Donnelly

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Mickey Donnelly as Tom Ripley – the wonderful Sarah Hilary, winner of the Theakson’s Crime Novel of the Year, compares ‘The Good Son’ with crime novels and ‘The Talented Mr Ripley’.

“In Mickey Donnelly, readers have an amateur detective who is also an innocent bystander. It’s a clever conceit, and a neat departure (intentional or otherwise) from the current fashion for unreliable narrators. Mickey witnesses events which readers understand to be depraved and brutal, but which Mickey relates with an innocent impartiality. This impartiality, were he not 10 years old, would hint at a lack of empathy, perhaps even sociopathic leanings. But Mickey is 10 and brutalised by his surroundings, growing up in a place so scarred and dangerous it rivals any improvised prison dreamt up by the worst of crime fiction’s serial killers. The pit in Buffalo Bill’s house has nothing on the Bray or the Bone hills. Hard to imagine a more degrading fate than that suffered by the young woman found tarred and feathered for sleeping with the wrong man, an image made all the more powerful because we know it happened often and to many.”

Read more.

Wonderful review of The Good Son

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Was sent this wonderful review of The Good Son over on Word Herding.

“…wildly funny and vibrant, with Mickey a likeable protagonist, gullible but surprisingly savvy when it counts, heartbreakingly vulnerable and equally heartbreakingly courageous. The relationships ring true in that they’re complex and constantly evolving.

Paul McVeigh is fearless in showing a world in all its unpleasant, gory detail… this is a wonderful, admirable book, tough and tender in equal measures. And it packs so much in that it stays in the mind long after reading.

Towards the end, I actually had to put the book aside for a few days, and then braced myself to read the final chapters with a sense of foreboding. It’s rare to read a book these days the ending of which you simply cannot predict, and this one achieved exactly that. I won’t spoil it for you, but I thought the ending was perfect.”

Danielle McLaughlin explores The Good Son

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Danielle McLaughlin explores The Good Son and the story that inspired it.

One of Ireland’s finest short story writers examines how I developed my short story, What I Did On My Summer Holidays, into ‘a captivating and poignant book’.

Click to read.

New Book Cover

Currently longlisted for The Polari Prize
Chosen as Brighton’s City Reads 2016
Shortlisted: The Guardian’s ‘Not The Booker’ Prize
Shortlisted: The Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award
Finalist for The People’s Book Prize
ELLE Magazine Best Books of 2015
The Irish Independent Top Reads of 2015
The Reading Agency Staff Picks Best of 2015
Wales Arts Review – Fiction of the Year
Number 1 Beach Read The Pool
A Gransnet Best Christmas Read for 2015
Savidge Reads and Pam Reader Blogs Books of the Year

 

Lisa McInerney, winner of The Bailey’s Prize raves about The Good Son

/ Paul McVeigh Writer / 1 Comment

The hottest writer in the UK/Ireland right now, Lisa McInerney, winner of The Bailey’s Prize and the Desmond Elliot Prize, raves about The Good Son in The Irish Times. “How dark humour makes a fun and disquieting read” click to read the full article.

On dark humour – “In especially skilful hands it can be a radical act, sharpening transgressive fiction or teasing out a reader’s complicity in monstrous acts. For McVeigh, such humour is both his characters’ psychological safeguard and a devastating literary technique, for it serves first as a delightful key to Mickey’s world, and then, once we are comfortable, as a horrifying contrast.”

 

Currently longlisted for The Polari Prize
Chosen as Brighton’s City Reads 2016
Shortlisted: The Guardian’s ‘Not The Booker’ Prize
Shortlisted: The Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award
Finalist for The People’s Book Prize
ELLE Magazine Best Books of 2015
The Irish Independent Top Reads of 2015
One of The Reading Agency Staff Picks Best of 2015
Wales Arts Review – Fiction of the Year
Number 1 Beach Read The Pool
A Gransnet Best Christmas Read for 2015
Savidge Reads and Pam Reader Blogs Books of the Year