'Ambitious' new book from McCabe to Unbound

Patrick McCabe's new book Poguemahone is being released though Unbound, with a pre-order campaign under way.

The book, the author's first for Unbound, is McCabe's 14th since he burst onto the scene with The Butcher Boy (Picador) in 1992, racking up two Booker Prize nominations and a host of prizes during his career so far.

Poguemahone — Gaelic for “kiss my arse” — is billed as his biggest and most ambitious book to date, “a wild, 600-page ballad, narrated in a kind of free verse monologue by Dan Fogarty, an Irishman living in England, who is looking after his sister Una, now 70 and suffering from dementia in a care home in Margate”.

The synopsis says: “From Dan’s anarchic account, we gradually piece together the story of the Fogarty family, and how they each learn to navigate the hard immigrant life in England. Much of the action takes place in the early 1970s in a bohemian squat in Kilburn, haunted by vindictive ghosts, who eat away at the sanity of all who live there. Forty-five years later, all that’s left of those sex-and-drug-soaked times are Una’s unspooling memories, as she sits outside in the Margate sunshine, and Dan himself, whose role in the story becomes ever darker and more sinister.”

Alongside the usual pre-orders, Unbound is offering tickets to gigs and launch events in London and Dublin in spring 2022, plus early proof copies for readers who don’t want to wait that long. 

John Mitchinson, Unbound’s publisher, said McCabe was one of his favourite authors and he got in touch after hearing about the “big, audacious” novel from a mutual friend.

He said: “Pogumahone is a book for the ages, an epic of the Irish in England, steeped in music and folklore, crammed with scores of characters, on a scale Pat has never attempted before. Imagine the supernatural terror of Beyond Black by Hilary Mantel, combined with the experimental élan of Lanny by Max Porter and the mesmeric ventriloquism of Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellman and you’ll get some idea of what McCabe has achieved.’

McCabe's agent, Marianne Gunn O’Connor, said: “When Pat delivered Poguemahone, a genie in a bottle of a book, I knew we needed a publisher with outside-the-box vision, and with the imagination to give this the platform it so deserves. It’s begging to be performed, and Pat’s already adapted a version for the stage. Before I had a chance to submit to a carefully chosen few editors, I received a call from John – his vision and passion for Poguemahone was so inspired and exciting my heart knew instinctively that this was the way to go. And we are loving this joyful and creative collaborative adventure with Unbound; they are on fire!”

McCabe added: “I have always taken my cue from Joyce — in that books should dance and be amusing too. But when I eventually got around to writing the psychedelic jig that had been clattering for many years offstage in the shadows, I didn't quite anticipate it turning out to be narrated by the otherworldly offspring of Syd Barrett and Kitty the Hare, the former being the English genius founder of Pink Floyd and the latter being the hooded fleeting mountain woman storyteller of old Munster… To say that I'm glad I wrote it is putting it mildly — but I'm even gladder that someone as intuitive and experienced as John Mitchinson and Unbound have agreed to publish it.”