‘While everybody else is going out playing football ... here you are, gnawing away at your insides’
Despite discouragement from all around him, Patrick McCabe kept coming back to Heartland, his latest and long-in-the-making novel
Patrick McCabe’s new novel, Heartland, was a long time coming. “It was a hard nut to crack,” he says, on a rainy spring afternoon, as he nurses a Diet Coke in the Library Bar of Dublin’s Central Hotel. “I started it in 1987” – five years, that is, before The Butcher Boy (1992) established McCabe as one of the major Irish writers of his generation. Heartland has, in a sense, been haunting McCabe ...
