Be Near Me

Description

Be near me when my light is low, When the blood creeps, and nerves prick, And tingle; and the heart is sick, And all the wheels of, Being slow. - from In Memoriam, A.H.H. Alfred Lord Tennyson. When an English priest takes over a small Scottish parish, not everyone is ready to accept him. He makes friends with two local youths, Mark and Lisa, and clashes with a world he can barely understand. The town seems to grow darker each night. Fate comes calling and before the summer is out his quiet life is the focus of public hysteria. Father David looks back to find a Lancashire childhood. He remembers a lost father and a grand school for Catholic boys. He finds 1960s Oxford in the heat of student revolt and recalls a choice he once made in the orange groves of Rome. Be Near Me is a story of art and politics, love and change, and a book about the way we live now. Trapped in class hatreds, threatened by personal flaws, Father David begins to discover what happened to the ideals of his generation. Meanwhile a religious war is unfolding on his doorstep . . .

Andrew O'Hagan was born in Glasgow in 1968. His first book, The Missing, was published in 1995 and shortlisted for the Esquire/Waterstone's/Apple Non-Fiction Award. Our Fathers, his debut novel, was shortlisted for the 1999 Booker Prize. His second novel, Personality, won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction. In 2003 Granta named him one of the Best of Young British Novelists. He lives in London.

"'One of the few truly essential works of fiction to emerge from this country during the past 20 years or more.' John Burnside, Daily Telegraph"