The Stray Sod Country

It is 1958, and as Laika, the Sputnik dog is launched into space,
Golly Murray, the Cullymore barber's wife, finds herself oddly obsessing
about the canine cosmonaut. Meanwhile, Fonsey 'Teddy' O'Neill, is
returning, like the prodigal son, from overseas, with brylcream in his
hair, and a Cuban-heeled swagger to his step, having experienced his
coming-of-age in Butlin's, Skegness. Father Augustus Hand is working on a
bold new theatrical production for Easter, which he, for one, knows
will put Cullymore on the map. And, as the Manchester United football
team prepare to take off from Munich airport, James A Reilly sits in his
hovel by the lake outside town, with his pet fox and his father's gun,
feeling the weight of an insidious and inscrutable presence pressing
down upon him.

From the closed terraces and back lanes of rural Ireland to the information highway and global separations of our own time, The Stray Sod Country is at once an homage to what we think we may have lost and a chilling reminder that the past has never really passed.

With echoes of Peyton Place, and Fellinni's Amarcord,
and with a sinister, diabolical narrator at its heart, this is at once a
story of a small town - with its secrets, fears, friendships and
betrayals - and a sweeping, grand guignol of theatrical extravagance from one of the finest writers of his generation.

Dettagli