Gavin Mccrea Books

The narrative explores a fraught mother-son relationship marked by repetitive conversations and unaddressed emotional wounds. The son's frustration with his mother's forgetfulness clashes with her desire to connect, revealing their struggles with communication and past grievances. As tensions rise, he grapples with his feelings of shame and the decision to avoid confronting painful memories, illustrating the complexity of familial bonds and the difficulty of seeking closure.

'Are you going into town today?' she says, which annoys me because it's something she says all the time, having forgotten she said it before, and I say, 'Jesus, Mum, not this again.' She is wounded by my tone, and I decide not to bring up what I intended to bring up, about the past, and about my need for her to apologise for it. Gavin McCrea is a writer who has lived abroad for his entire adult life. Now though, he is staying in a small flat in south Dublin with his eighty-year-old mother, whose mind is slowly slipping away. He has returned home to care for her and to write. But all he finds he can write about is her. He unspools an intimate story of his upbringing and early adulthood: feeling out of place in the affluent suburb in which he grew up, the homophobic bullying he suffered at school, his brother's mental illness and drug addiction, his father's death, his own devastating diagnosis, his struggles and triumphs as a writer, and above all, always, his relationship with his mother. Her brightness shines a light over his childhood, but her betrayal of his teenage self leads to years of resentment and disconnection. Now, he must find a way to reconcile with her, before it is too late.

Against the backdrop of China's Cultural Revolution and Europe's sexual revolution, the fates of two families in London and Beijing become unexpectedly intertwined, in this dazzling new novel from the author of Mrs Engels. In London, sisters Iris and Eva plan an attack on the West End theatre where their mother is playing the title role in Miss Julie; in Beijing, Jiang Qing, Chairman Mao's wife, rehearses a gala performance of her model ballet, which she will use to attack her enemies in the Party. As the preparations for these two performances unfold, these three 'sisters' find themselves bound together by the passions of love, by the obsessions of power, and by the forces of history. Exquisitely observed, relevant, and wise, The Sisters Maoshows us that the political is always personal.

Against the backdrop of China's Cultural Revolution and Europe's sexual revolution, the fates of two families in London and Beijing become unexpectedly intertwined, in this dazzling new novel from the author of Mrs Engels. Revolution is a Family Affair. In London, sisters Iris and Eva, members of a radical performance collective, plan an attack on the West End theatre where their mother is playing the title role in Miss Julie. Meanwhile in Beijing, Jiang, Chairman Mao's wife, rehearses a gala performance of her model ballet, The Red Detachment of Women, which she will use in order to attack her enemies in the Party. As the preparations for these two astonishing performances unfold, Iris, Eva, and Jiang are transformed into unforgettable protagonists in a single epic drama. The three 'sisters', although fighting very different personal battles, find themselves bound together by the passions of love, by the obsessions of power, and by the forces of history. Exquisitely observed, relevant, and wise, The Sisters Maoshows us that the political is always personal.

In September 1871, a train leaves Manchester bound for London. On board is Lizzie Burns, a poor worker from the Irish slums, who is embarking on the journey that will change her forever. Sitting in the first-class carriage beside her lover, the wealthy mill-owner Frederick Engels, the vision of a life of peace and...