Winterwood - Softcover

Patrick McCabe was born in Clones, Co Monaghan, Ireland in 1955. His novels include Carn, The Dead School and 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. Breakfast On Pluto, published in 1998, was also on the Booker Prize shortlist. He lives in Sligo with his wife and two daughters.

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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