The Journey Home: Dermot Bolger - Tapa blanda

‘A film-noir of a book, with a double murder at its core...excitingly and absorbingly told.’ Sunday Times

‘It is the best novel about Dublin since Joyce. Hano’s initiation into sleazy Dublin nightlife and Shay’s eventual tragic humiliation is conveyed with a compelling, even reckless, intensity.’ Irish Independent

‘Devastatingly forceful...Bolger is to Dublin what Dickens was to Victorian London: archivist, reporter, sometimes infuriated lover.’ Joseph O’Connor

‘The Journey Home’ is the story of a young boy’s struggle towards maturity, set against a shocking portrait of Ireland: a tough urban landscape, not a rural Eden.

Francis Hanrahan, the shy child of grey suburban streets, is Francy at home to his country-born parents. But when he meets Shay, an older, wilder image of himself, he becomes Hano, and is cast out into the night-time world of Dublin – a world of drugs, all-night drinking sessions in bars and snooker halls, and the stench of political corruption.