Mike McCormack

Mike McCormack made a name for himself as a punky renegade. His first book, the story collection Getting It in the Head, appeared in the mid-1990s; McCormack’s febrile, brutalist, sci-fi-enhanced aesthetic must have looked aberrant in an Irish literary culture that was even more trenchantly conservative then than it is now. His talents were recognised nonetheless – he was awarded the Rooney Prize for Literature – and an older, wiser McCormack now presents us with his fifth book, and first novel since 2007’s Notes from a Coma.