Poguemahone – in which an Irish transplant, Dan Fogarty, relates his and his dementia-addled sister Una’s ofttimes bleak origin story in London’s working-class Kilburn district in the mid-1970s – keeps drawing favourable comparisons with James Joyce’s Ulysses. But his most audacious experiment to date – a 600-page novel in free verse, shot through with Gaelic, Irish folklore, pop-music references, goblins and spirits – seems to be paying off. He’s enjoyed and endured critical hugs and hidings ever since, largely because he’s never stopped experimenting. You could say Patrick McCabe’s career was launched in earnest in 1992, when his third novel, The Butcher Boy, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and subsequently made into a Neil Jordan-helmed film (as was 1998′s Breakfast on Pluto).
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