'A rowdy, compelling love story' Guardian - the new novel from the author of the brilliant and much-loved The Fields.

Jay is a 30-year-old Irish transplant from the wilds of Roscommon who adores his small daughter, Bonnie, but whose traumatic birth leads to the dissolution of his marriage with Anglo-American TV producer Shauna. Jay, however, has previously endured a shock bust-up with his own mother and has not returned home to Ireland because of this, since fleeing the country a decade before. Years of hard graft on London building sites followed and the dizzying drug-laced whirl of a nascent career in mid-90s television, where he met Shauna. Resolved to move forward, Jay finds himself a flat-share with two eccentric Kenyan businessmen, snags a prestige building job (through 'Dublin Darren', an old laboring contact) working on the new tube station for the Millennium Dome, and is utterly rigid in his commitment to Bonnie time. Indeed, things might have even begun to look up were it not for the arrival, in the early hours of Easter Monday 1999, of an old 'friend' from home. 'The Clappers' is six foot tall, four foot wide, built like several Guinness barrels strapped together, and is all, all woman. She means well, and she means to make everything right for Jay. But inevitably, she makes it wrong. And cue a helter-skelter dash to Ireland, some brutal revelations on behalf of Jay's mother, and an inevitable return to London for a midnight epiphany in the shadow of Tony Blair, The Queen, and Auld Lang Syne.

Wonderful . . . written with a wicked sense of humour that almost, but not quite, disguises the fact that at the heart of this fabulous, funny, sad, crazy journey is a love story