Close To Home Av Michael Magee

<p>While growing up in West Belfast, Sean does every¿thing he''s supposed to do. He works hard, he studies, and he - mostly - stays out of trouble. The thirty-year conflict is over, he''s told, and his future is lit with promise. <br><br>But when Sean returns home from university, he finds much of the same-the same friends doing the same gear in the same clubs; the same lost broth¿ers and mad fathers; the same closed doors; the same silences. There are no jobs, Sean''s degree isn''t worth the paper it''s written on, and no one will give him the time of day. One night, he assaults a stranger at a party, and everything begins to come undone. <br><br><i>Close to Home</i> begins with this sudden act of violence and expands into a startling portrait of working-class Ireland under the long shadow of the Troubles. It''s a first novel drawn from life, written with the immediacy of thought. It''s about what happens when men get desperate, about the cycles of loss and trauma and secrecy that kee