Carry Me Down

Description

Winner, The Hawthornden Prize, United Kingdom Winner, The Encore Award, United Kingdom Shortlisted, Man Booker Prize Longlisted, Orange Prize for Fiction John Egan lives with his mother, father and grandmother in rural Ireland.aThe Guinness Book of Recordsais his favourite book and he wants to visit Niagara Falls with his mother. But, more than anything, he is determined to become a world-famous lie detector, almost at any cost. Carry Me Downais written in clean, compelling prose, and is about John's obsessive and dangerous desire to see the truth, even as his family is threatened in countless ways. In this singular tale of disturbed love every word rings true.

M.J. Hyland was born in London to Irish parents in 1968 and spent her early childhood in Dublin. She studied English and Law at the University of Melbourne and worked as a lawyer for several years. How the Light Gets In, her first novel, was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and the Age Book of the Year Award, and was the joint winner of the Best Young Australian Novelist Award. Her second novel, Carry Me Down, was shortlisted for the 2006 Man Booker Prize and won both the Hawthornden and Encore Prizes. Her most recent novel is This is How. Hyland lives in Manchester, England, where she teaches in the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester.

'Carry Me Down is uncompromising, unputdownable and done with expert lightness. It's a work of discreet brilliance. M.J. Hyland is a truly gifted writer.' Ali Smith 'This is writing of the highest order.' J. M. Coetzee 'Hyland's talent and her power of realisation are manifest and moving...a novel that will command the world's attention.' Monthly 'Hyland writes in unadorned, clear prose, evoking period, place and setting with intense clarity and a lovely, restrained lyricism.' Australian 'Carry Me Down is a heart-rendingly domestic work full of compassion for the most ordinary of our human frailties.' Age 'Hyland's disquieting novel is feverishly alert to childhood's bewilderments and sensitively articulates the strange osmosis between the mundane and the otherworldly.' Sunday Times