Promotional Information

Longlisted for the Booker Prize, Andrew O'Hagan's Be Near Me is a brilliantly moving story of art and politics, love and change, and the way we live now.

About the Author

Andrew O'Hagan was born in Glasgow in 1968. His first book, The Missing, was published in 1995 and shortlisted for the Esquire/Waterstone's/Apple Non-Fiction Award. Our Fathers, his debut novel, was shortlisted for the 1999 Booker Prize. His second novel, Personality, won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction. In 2003 Granta named him one of the Best of Young British Novelists. He lives in London.

Reviews

"'One of the few truly essential works of fiction to emerge from this country during the past 20 years or more.' John Burnside, Daily Telegraph"

Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, O'Hagan's third novel features Father David Anderton, a proud descendant of Lancashire's Catholic martyrs, who undergoes his own ordeal when he transfers to the deprived parish of Dalgarnock. Though born in Edinburgh, he is perceived as an Englishman among Scots, an Oxford-educated wine sipper amid the ale-drinking unemployed, and a Catholic priest in an angrily Protestant town: "Northern Ireland was just across the water, and what Dalgarnock had was a briny dilution of Ireland's famous troubles, without the interest in votes, assemblies or breakable guns." Aware of all this yet politically na?ve, Father David alienates locals with his insistence on high culture and tentative support for the Iraq war. When he falls into an uneasy friendship with two teenage hoodlums-whose bracing portrayal make them recognizable to any teacher-the plot takes a predictable turn toward priests behaving badly and the ensuing small-town witch trial. Though that story has been told before, O'Hagan keeps both accused and accusers human and even noble. The most minor characters are drawn with truth and complexity, and O'Hagan's prose is stylistically dazzling, as crafted and lovely as the best poetry. Recommended for most collections.-Leora Bersohn, doctoral student, Columbia Univ., New York Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.