About the Author: Patrick McCabe
Patrick McCabe came to prominence with the publication of his third adult novel, The Butcher Boy, in 1992; the book was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in Britain and won the Irish Times-Aer Lingus Prize for fiction. McCabe's strength as an author lies in his ability to probe behind the veneer of respectability and conformity to reveal the brutality and the cloying and corrupting stagnation of Irish small-town life, but he is able to find compassion for the subjects of his fiction. His prose has a vitality and an anti-authoritarian bent, using everyday language to deconstruct the ideologies at work in Ireland between the early 1960s and the late 1970s. His books can be read as a plea for a pluralistic Irish culture that can encompass the past without being dominated by it.
McCabe is an Irish writer of mostly dark and violent novels of contemporary, often small-town, Ireland. His novels include The Butcher Boy (1992) and Breakfast on Pluto (1998), both shortlisted for the Booker Prize. He has also written a children's book (The Adventures of Shay Mouse) and several radio plays broadcast by the RTÉ and the BBC Radio 4. The Butcher Boy and Breakfast on Pluto have both been adapted into films by Irish director Neil Jordan.
McCabe lives in Clones, Co. Monaghan with his wife and two daughters.
Pat McCabe is also credited with having invented the "Bog Gothic" genre.
Find the best price forThe Holy City
Library Edition by Patrick McCabe, Humphrey Bower
Goodreads rating: 
Audio CD, Published in Mar 2012 by Bolinda Audio
ISBN10: 174319112X | ISBN13: 9781743191125
Now entering his sixty-seventh year, Chris McCool can confidently call himself a member of the Happy Club: he has an attractive Croatian girlfriend and has been told he bears more than a passing resemblance to Roger Moore. As he looks back on the glory days of his youth, he recalls the swinging sixties of rural Ireland. Chris McCool had it all back then. He had the moves, he had the car, and he had Dolly, a woman who purred suggestive songs and tugged gently at her skin-tight dresses. Except that there was another Mr Wonderful in town, a certain Marcus Otoyo – a young Nigerian with glossy curls and a dazzling devoutness that was all but irresistible.
Spiked with macabre humour and disquieting revelations, The Holy City is a brilliant, disturbing and compelling novel from one of Ireland’s most original contemporary writers.
‘McCabe slowly transforms his unreliable narrator from a campy Austin Powers-like figure to a sick creep with a violent streak. [A] mesmerizing but unsettling read.’ — Booklist
‘Few people can make an unreliable narrator and a vigorously scrambled time-scheme as compelling as McCabe can, and his storytelling powers are in full flow in The Holy City’ — Guardian
‘A hall of mirrors [McCool’s] intensifying madness, religious and sexual confusion and mental deterioration are painful to read and cleverly drawn; real and imagined events are veiled with McCabe’s engaging lyricism’ — The Times
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