The road to Notown - Michael Foley

A satirical novel about the pretensions, hypocrisies and paranoia of the literary world and its hangers-on - novelists, poets, academics, passionate women and barking-mad eccentrics - and, for good measure, Northern Irish cultural conditioning, marital breakdown and the maelstrom that passes for family life. Filtered through the bemused, wisecracking observations of the young narrator, the plot gallops through a twenty-year journey from the North to Dublin to London, encountering on the way Kyle Magee 'the Zorba of the North' - novelist, painter, jazzman, drinker, lover of women and celebrant of life - and the lovers, relatives, disciples and poseurs that swirl in the vortex of his restless energy.