It is a wild, free-verse monologue, steeped in music and folklore, crammed with characters, both real and imagined, on a scale Patrick McCabe has never attempted before. Poguemahone is a huge, shape-shifting epic from one of modern Ireland's greatest writers. And, finally, how all that survives now 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 stranger and more sinister.

How the squat appears to be haunted by vindictive ghosts who eat away at the sanity of all who live there. How a young and overweight Una finds herself living in a hippie squat in Kilburn in the early 1970s. How Dots, the mother, becomes a call girl in 1950s Soho. How the parents are exiled from a small Irish village and end up living the hard immigrant life in England. From Dan’s anarchic account, we gradually piece together the story of the Fogarty family. McCabe is truly original’ Elaine Feeney Dan Fogarty, an Irishman living in England, is looking after his sister Una, now seventy and suffering from dementia in a care home. The characters are electric, the narrative fuelled with a brilliant frenetic energy. ‘If you’re looking for this century’s Ulysses, look no further … a stunningly lyrical novel’ Alex Preston, Observer ‘Pitched – deliriously – between high modernism and folk magic, between gorgeous free-verse and hilarious Irish vernacular, Poguemahone is a stunning achievement … profoundly affecting’ David Keenan ‘A blistering, brilliant ballad of mad tales from rural Ireland to London Town.

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