Winterwood: A Novel - Softcover

McCabe, Patrick

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1596915137 ISBN 13: 9781596915138

Publisher: Bloomsbury USA, 2008

Synopsis

"A fever dream of a novel...At heart, Winterwood is a Gothic ghost story...like Stephen King, McCabe knows how to invest pop culture with a sinister bathos. McCabe is also more intense than King (or just about anyone else)."―New York Times Book Review

The San Francisco Chronicle declared him "one of the most brilliant writers to ever come out of Ireland," and Neil Jordan called Winterwood "the most terrifying book I've ever read." In this chilling and unforgettable novel, Patrick McCabe shows us that nothing―and no one―is ever quite what they seem. Shortlisted for the Irish Book Award for Novel of the Year, Winterwood is a disturbing tale of love, death, and identity from a masterful novelist whose "books are skillful exercises in the macabre and the horrific. It is as though Stephen King had learned how to write" (New York Review of Books).

About this title

About the Author

Patrick McCabe was born in Ireland in 1955. His novels include The Butcher Boy, winner of the Irish Times/Aer Lingus Literature Prize, which was shortlisted for the 1992 Booker Prize and made into a highly acclaimed film directed by Neil Jordan, and Breakfast On Pluto, published in 1998, also on the Booker Prize shortlist. He lives in Sligo with his wife and two daughters.

From Publishers Weekly

Freelance writer Redmond Hatch loves his young wife, Catherine—he is 40 and she is 22 when they wed in 1981—and adores his infant daughter, Imogen, but in Irish author McCabe's eighth novel (his prior work included Breakfast on Pluto and The Butcher Boy, both shortlisted for the Booker Prize), Redmond's happy slice of the world cruelly crumbles. A few years into wedded bliss, Redmond's wife cuckolds and then divorces him; he feigns suicide, assumes a false identity and disappears into a sad-sack life that spirals sharply downward after he reads a newspaper account of the suicide of convicted child murderer (and creepy acquaintance) Ned Strange: Redmond's suddenly haunted by nightmares and hallucinations in which Ned molests him. He stalks his former family and, in 1991, kidnaps and kills his estranged daughter, burying her in the isolated countryside—their imaginary "winterwood"—and visiting her grave over the next decade. Redmond, however, has yet to bottom out. Despite a fractured, hard-to-follow chronology, this tale about a man's descent into madness is both artfully repellent and hypnotically compelling. (Feb.)
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About this edition

• Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 1596915137
• ISBN 13: 9781596915138
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256