Imprint
- Sceptre
Ireland, Fiction, Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945)
As entertaining as it is moving, HOME is a tale of hippies, priests, Marc Bolan and small-town Ireland.
Born on a Devon commune in the sixties to a teenage single mother, Coorg is declared to be the new Merlin by the group (until he is supplanted by Marc Bolan) and grows up on peace, love and brown rice - until Coorg's grandparents abduct him when he is 6, taking him back to Ireland where he is renamed Joseph and introduced to Mass, sweets, and the back of his grandmother's hand.
Joe grows up in a small seaside town trying hard to fit into a dysfunctional family and a Church that doesn't seem to reward his efforts, but when he decides to be bad he finds sinning gets him no further. Then his feckless mother reappears, on the trail of the Holy Grail and (when Marc Bolan dies) after Joe as the messiah who will save the world. On the cusp of adulthood, his head churning with Catholicism, mysticism as well as the more usual teenage concerns, Joe finally cracks.
More books by Frank Ronan
Praise for Home
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God preserve us from another novel about growing up in small town Ireland. Tick them all off: ignorant nuns and sadistic Christian Brothers, tongue-clacking neighbours, drunks, repressive relatives. But Ronan's unexpectedly brilliant novel opens in 1960s Devon with a bold flourish: Coorg starts his life in a hippy commune called the hOme ... So delightfully sharp and funny are the commune passages that I felt a certain amount of resistance to the move to familiar fictional Ireland. But in Ronan's hands, that world is just as surreal ... It's not clear which environment can take the credit for this trusting, wise and compassionate adolescent. Perhaps he really is a star-child after all. - Suzi Feay, Independent on Sunday
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Brilliant ... delightfully sharp and funny - Suzi Feay, Independent on Sunday
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His writing is wonderfully quirky and his social satire resembles an unholy marriage of E. F. Benson and Patrick McCabe ... His wryly affectionate portrait deserves to become a cult. - Michael Arditti, Daily Mail
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His writing is wonderfully quirky and his social satire resembles an unholy marriage of E. F. Benson and Patrick McCabe. He finds worthy targets in the excesses of the New Age and the hypocrisies of conventional religion. His wryly affectionate portrait deserves to become a cult. - Michael Arditti, Daily Mail
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Both worlds are brought to life with an outsider's eye for the ridiculous in this lovely novel about a boy growing up surrounded by dysfunctional adults. - Big Issue
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This could have turned out to be a very different novel but Ronan brings a canny lightness of touch to the material, transforming it into a sparkling satire of religious upbringings, conventional or otherwise. And as a boy struggles to grow up, the twinkly tone deepens, via impressive lyrical flourishes, finally reclining gently into irresistible melancholy - The Face
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A sparkling satire of religious upbringings, conventional or otherwise. - The Face
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The quirkiness of the writing creates a bubbly surface which bristles with sassy satire; HOME is a clever send-up of out-there extremism of both new age and the old age varieties. But there is a poignancy at the heart of the story which lifts it out of the category of instant entertainment and into the realm of memorability. Far harder to categorise than it is to enjoy, HOME is a delightful piece of well-written whimsy. - Irish Times
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