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‘A joy to read: fresh, funny, moving and always surprising’ Kate Atkinson
‘Fresh, beguiling and laugh-out-loud funny on every page, this must be the most enjoyable Irish novel since Skippy Dies‘ Guardian</font>
They’d sit around in a steamy kitchen circle like four mad witches, and dip ginger-snaps into Maxwell House until they went wobbly-warm, and take turns at saying, Jahear about so-and-so, Lord rest his soul, only thirty years old, poor creature?! They were brilliant at it. Scaring the shite out of each other, grinning inside.
Jim Finnegan is thirteen years old and life in his world consists of dealing with the helter-skelter intensity of his rumbustious family, taking breakneck bike rides with his best friend, and coveting the local girls from afar – until one day when everything changes.
The Fields is an unforgettable story of an extraordinary character: Jim’s voice leaps off the page and straight into the reader’s heart as he grapples with his unfairly interrupted adolescence.
Praise for The Fields:
‘Heartbreaking and hilarious in equal measures’ Stylist
Funny and heart-warming’ Daily Mail
‘The Fields is crazy mad, lyrical and unforgettable’ Red
‘Exquisite moments of comedy that anyone with a whiff of Irish heritage will immediately recognise’ Sunday Express
‘Fresh, beguiling and laugh-out-loud funny on every page, this must be the most enjoyable Irish novel since Skippy Dies‘ Guardian</font>
They’d sit around in a steamy kitchen circle like four mad witches, and dip ginger-snaps into Maxwell House until they went wobbly-warm, and take turns at saying, Jahear about so-and-so, Lord rest his soul, only thirty years old, poor creature?! They were brilliant at it. Scaring the shite out of each other, grinning inside.
Jim Finnegan is thirteen years old and life in his world consists of dealing with the helter-skelter intensity of his rumbustious family, taking breakneck bike rides with his best friend, and coveting the local girls from afar – until one day when everything changes.
The Fields is an unforgettable story of an extraordinary character: Jim’s voice leaps off the page and straight into the reader’s heart as he grapples with his unfairly interrupted adolescence.
Praise for The Fields:
‘Heartbreaking and hilarious in equal measures’ Stylist
Funny and heart-warming’ Daily Mail
‘The Fields is crazy mad, lyrical and unforgettable’ Red
‘Exquisite moments of comedy that anyone with a whiff of Irish heritage will immediately recognise’ Sunday Express
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Reviews
It's not often, reading a first novel, that you can settle back with a happy sigh, confident that you're in safe hands. The narrator of Kevin Maher's debut, 13-year-old Jim Finnegan, hits his comic stride straight away, and doesn't let up for a minute . . . With pin-sharp period detail and a frenetic comic energy, this Irish debut is a laugh-out-loud read . . .Thrust into extremity, Jim retains that childlike combination of innocence and enthusiasm that can make even daily existence seem larger-than-life: The Fields glows larger still. Fresh, beguiling and laugh-out-loud funny on every page, this must be the most enjoyable Irish novel since Skippy Dies
Black comedy and infinite narrative energy...Maher's writing is immediate, highly descriptive and unflinching
The Fields is a powerful comic debut
Plunging you headlong into 80s Ireland, Kevin Maher's debut novel, The Fields is crazy mad, lyrical and unforgettable . . . [a] funny, moving, compelling and hugely original coming of age story . . . Don't miss this brilliant debut from a remarkable new voice
When my friend said this was the best book he's ever read I had pretty high expectations and it didn't disappoint . . . utterly captivating. If you're a fan of Chris O'Dowd's Moone Boy then this is definitely for you
Entertaining, often hilarious, touching and at times deeply troubling . . . There are some exquisite moments of comedy that anyone with a whiff of Irish heritage will immediately recognise . . . Jim's strength, humour and vibrancy flood the novel with an energy and optimism that will leave you warm inside. The Fields is a story about the messiness of family life, yes, but it is also, ultimately, a beautiful tribute to families everywhere that soldier on no matter what life throws at them
Rich in period detail, Kevin Maher's debut novel captures the spirit of the changing times in Ireland, and convincingly conveys all the exuberance, uncertainty and angst of being a teenage boy; it's funny and heart-warming. Maher is an engaging writer and this is a hugely enjoyable - and promising - debut
Heartbreaking and hilarious in equal measures . . . the relationship with the most profound effect on him - with his father - is the least dramatic but it's so quietly devastating it had me in tears . . . I couldn't put it down. And for someone like me - a slow reader with a short commute - that's really saying something
A fabulous first novel . . . beautifully observed . . . very funny indeed
Magic and weirdly moving
Were Roddy Doyle to co-author a novel with Edward St. Aubyn, the results might look a lot like Kevin Maher's gloriously ribald debut,The Fields. Taking the former's mastery of Irish demotic and the latter's peculiar talent for unearthing gallows humour in the most upsetting of personal tragedies, Maher's picaresque tale certainly packs a punch . . . Maher's fearless and heartwarming prose is simply too lovely to resist
The Fields is crazy mad, lyrical and unforgettable...a funny, moving, compelling and hugely original coming of age story
Larger-than-life: fresh, beguiling and laugh-out-loud funny, this must be the most enjoyable Irish novel since Skippy Dies
Funny and heart-warming. Maher is an engaging writer and this is a hugely enjoyable debut
Heartbreaking and hilarious in equal measure...the relationship with the most profound effect on him - with his father - is the least dramatic but it's so quietly devastating it had me in tears...I couldn't put it down
Very funny, infected with the rueful mirth of memory. Maher has built the serious underlying novel from the comedy of childhood in Ireland
Black comedy and infinite narrative energy . . . Maher's writing is immediate, highly descriptive and unflinching . . . reminiscent of some of Patrick McCabe's work. The Fields is a clever novel and operates on many levels. Highly accessible, it wears its ideas lightly . . . Jim . . . begins to believe that he might be a healer himself. The belief leads to a beautiful and extraordinary conclusion. Jim's healing - or redemption - doesn't seem inauthentic; and nor does it negate what he has suffered because, from the outset, Maher has made space for the seemingly impossible
Jim Finnegan is up there with the great teenage narrators of literature, like Holden Caulfield, Adrian Mole, or David Mitchell's Jason Taylor . . . Through it all he maintains the same brilliantly comic, authentically adolescent voice: knowing, cynical, sarcastic, lugubrious, yet also warm, generous and sympathetic . . . The story explores an impressive range of themes: Irishness, religion, love, death, punishment, forgiveness, hypocrisy, abortion, the family. It's a novel to make you laugh, gasp, wince and think
Utterly captivating. If you're a fan of Chris O'Dowd's Moone Boy then this is definitely for you
Were Roddy Doyle to co-author a novel with Edward St. Aubyn, the results might look a lot like Kevin Maher's gloriously ribald debut, The Fields...Maher's fearless and heartwarming prose is simply too lovely to resist
Jim Finnegan is up there with the great teenage narrators of literature, like Holden Caulfield, Adrian Mole, or David Mitchell's Jason Taylor . . . a novel to make you laugh, gasp, wince and think
Magic and weirdly moving