Bad Day in Blackrock

On a late August night in 2004 a young man is kicked to death by his teammates outside a Dublin nightclub and celebration turns to devastation. The reverberations of that event, its genesis and aftermath, is the subject of this extraordinary story, stripping away the veneer of a generation of Celtic cubs, whose social and sexual mores are chronicled and dissected in this tract for our times. The victim, Conor Harris, his killers - three of them are charged with manslaughter - and the trial judge share common childhoods and schooling in the privileged echelons of south Dublin suburbia. The intertwining of these lives leaves their afflicted families in moral freefall as public exposure merges with private anguish and imploded futures.This stark, elliptical tale tells of catharsis and self-examination through the eyes of the narrator and Laura Haines, girlfriend, confidante and catalyst. Akin to Lionel Shriver's "We Need to Talk About Kevin", John Banville's "The Book of Evidence" and Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood", it deals with the unacceptable, and the nature of truth. Like all good fiction, it illuminates a society and transcends its age with the searchlight of a sympathetic imagination. It is a significant debut by an intuitive writer.

ISBN 1843511460   DEWEY edition DC22 ISBN13 9781843511465 (What's this?)   Pages 288 Publisher The Lilliput Press Ltd   Published in Dublin Imprint The Lilliput Press Ltd   Height (mm) 215 Format Paperback   Width (mm) 136 Publication date 15 Oct 2008   Academic level General DEWEY 823.92

"'This is the defining story of his generation. It should be told.' Frank McGuinness"

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