The Big Yaroo

Sequel to the bestselling Butcher Boy, Francie Brady is back! Francie Brady, the broken Butcher Boy, leads a busy life in Fizzbag Mansions, where he was incarcerated five decades ago after the mistake with Mrs Nugent. Still obsessed with the comic books of his childhood, he has found a new vocation - as a publisher of his very own magazine, The Big Yaroo, and Francie throws himself into its production, working to a deadline in more ways than one. Along the way, he remembers Da, Uncle Alo, Joe Purcell and his beloved Ma, and wrestles a desire to escape his past with the world's need for him to exorcise his childhood demons. As Francie is drawn even further into the dark world of his own mind, the line between reality and delusion ceases to mean anything. Uproariously funny, terrifying and profound, this is the swansong of one Irish literature's most enduring characters.

Patrick McCabe was born in 1955 in Clones, County Monaghan. He is the author of The Butcher Boy (1992), which won the Irish Times Irish Literature Prize for Fiction; The Dead School; Breakfast on Pluto and others. The Butcher Boy and Breakfast on Pluto were both shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Winterwood was published in 2006, and was named the 2007 Hughes & Hughes/Irish Independent Irish Novel of the Year. His most recent novels are Heartland (2018) and The Big Yaroo (2019).