Goldengrove — Patrick McCabe

A dark theatrical comedy about the vexed and violent relationship between Britain and Ireland, from twice Booker-shortlisted author Patrick McCabe.It’s the summer of Brexit, and in a seedy hotel room on the South Coast of England, Chenevix Meredith finds his old comrade Henry Plumm murdered in the bathtub. Piecing together their shared history, Meredith looks back at the years they spent in Dublin half a century ago, running a theatrical agency and rubbing shoulders with actors and assassins alike in the swirling smoke of public houses. What their clients didn’t know, is that the flamboyant pair were undercover agents of the British state, posted to identify terrorist networks.Goldengrove is a deeply immersive, satirical novel in which nothing is as it seems and no one is who they say there are. Steeped in film noir, classic crime and popular culture, McCabe blurs the lines between what’s real and what’s staged in this absurd game of cat and mouse.