Last Night on Earth
Formats & Editions
Jay adores his small daughter, Bonnie, and nothing matters more to him than being a good father. But Bonnie's traumatic birth puts an unbearable strain on his marriage with Shauna and the couple eventually separate. Struggling to cope with the separation from 3-year-old Bonnie, Jay thinks constantly of his own mother who he hasn't seen since he fled Ireland a decade before.
Resolved to move forward, Jay finds himself a flat-share with two eccentric Kenyan businessmen, snags a role working on a documentary about the Millennium Dome (through 'Dublin Darren', an old laboring contact), 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 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.
A helter-skelter dash to Ireland results in some brutal revelations on behalf of Jay's mother, and an inevitable return to London culminates in a midnight epiphany in the shadow of Tony Blair, The Queen, and Auld Lang Syne. Can Jay be a good father to Bonnie? Or is it too late.
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Praise for Last Night on Earth
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It's not often, reading a first novel, that you can settle back with a happy sigh, confident that you're in safe hands . . .Fresh, beguiling and laugh-out-loud funny on every page, this must be the most enjoyable Irish novel since Skippy Dies - The Guardian
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Heartbreaking and hilarious in equal measures . . .I couldn't put it down. And for someone like me - a slow reader with a short commute - that's really saying something - Stylist
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Jim Finnegan is up there with the great teenage narrators of literature . . . Through it all he maintains the same brilliantly comic, authentically adolescent voice: knowing, cynical, sarcastic, lugubrious, yet also warm, generous and sympathetic . . . It's a novel to make you laugh, gasp, wince and think - Independent on Sunday
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Were Roddy Doyle to co-author a novel with Edward St. Aubyn, the results might look a lot like Kevin Maher's gloriously ribald debut, The Fields. . . Maher's fearless and heartwarming prose is simply too lovely to resist - Metro
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