Hello and Goodbye: Hello Mr Bones / Goodbye Mr Rat

Welcome to Hello and Goodbye: two dark tales from two deceased narrators - bottled-lightning treats that will make you gasp, gurn, shiver and squirm. HELLO MR BONES: two damaged souls have, thanks to each other's love, turned their lives around. But as London's weather takes a turn for the worse, so do their fates, when raw evil runs riot the night of the impossible hurricane. GOODBYE MR RAT: an IRA bomber watches over his ex-lover as she takes his ashes back to his rural hometown. This girl from northern Indiana may not be ready for rural Ireland, yet the townsfolk of Iron Valley certainly have plans for her... Stark, blackly humorous and compressed to the point of detonation; McCabe writes like M. R. James took a dread wrong turning on an Irish country road.

The New York Times

"[McCabe] is expert at making the darkest deeds funny, forcing us to laugh at the worst things in the world. He writes like an Irish Lenny Bruce, riffing at warp speed, swerving from one time to another and one place to another and strewing the landscape with allusion . . . and somehow it all makes sense . . . The stories McCabe tells have a terrible beauty. "

John Boland, The Independent

"McCabe is especially good at conjuring up the menace of psychopaths who perpetrate acts of barbarism under the spurious guise of ideologies."

JP O'Malley, The Observer

"A rewarding experience which sees the master of the Irish gothic genre return to his best form in years."

Paul Dunn, The Times

"Both bits of Hello and Goodbye are exuberant and witty and Goodbye Mr Rat deserves to rekindle his former glories."

About the Author

Patrick McCabe is the author of The Butcher Boy (winner of the Irish Times/Aer lingus Literature Prize and shortlisted for the 1992 Booker Prize) and Breakfast on Pluto (shortlisted for the 1998 Booker Prize), both of which were made into highly acclaimed films by director Neil Jordan. He also wrote Winterwood, winner of the 2006 Hughes & Hughes/Irish Independent Novel of the Year. He lives in Sligo, Ireland.

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