Throughout Michael Magee’s lucid and stirring debut novel, Close to Home, the narrator, Sean, grapples with the repercussions of his assault on a teenager at a party. After completing his studies at university in Liverpool, Sean returns to Belfast, a city that many of his peers are seeking a way out of, and attempts to rebuild his life while navigating a plethora of complications. 

The book’s first-person narrative immerses the reader in Sean’s tumultuous life: his legal troubles, his difficulties finding and holding down a job and his return to his mother’s house. Magee’s persistently evocative and beautifully matter-of-fact descriptions of Belfast’s landmarks and people are intertwined with a sensitive awareness of the city’s social, political and religious history: you can almost hear the balls clattering into one another in the snooker halls and the drum of techno in the nightclubs.

Written in three parts, Magee’s story also explores the traumas, difficulties and complications of life in Belfast more generally. Sean, his brother Anthony and many of his contemporaries are disadvantaged by social and financial insecurity. Generational divides, as well as class and religious differences, are channelled through the vulnerable narrative