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Published Oct 2017
224 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
Set in Ireland and New York, a debut novel about an affair and its explosive consequences - the sins of the father visited on the son in unexpected and irreversible ways.
Outside an east Belfast mission hall, pastor and family man Samuel Orr meets Anna, a young Beckett scholar. They embark on an intense, passionate affair, their connection fueled by their respective love of Christ and Beckett. When Anna falls pregnant the affair is revealed. The repercussions are slow to emerge but inescapable, and the fallout when it finally comes is shocking, cruel, and violent.
Over thirty years later Sam, their son, is in New York, living a steady, guarded life, his childhood and family safely abandoned. But the sins of the fathers are visited often on their children, and the past crashes into his life as violently as in his youth. He is forced to confront the fears he has kept close all these years.
The First Day is the story of an affair and its consequences - on family and on faith. It is an intense, questioning novel of the search to understand our origins and to free ourselves from the burdens of our early years. It's a stunning debut, meditative and compelling, incantatory, at times devastating and always mesmerizing.
"Well-crafted on a sentence level, The Last Day will appeal to readers appreciative of experimental style choices: the story does not follow conventional dialogue punctuation and there is a surprising narrative choice. More problematic for this reader was the thematic disconnect between the two parts of the story. What began as a struggle between love of God vs. earthly romantic love shifted into a distanced exploration of a secondary character's struggle with mental illness." - BookBrowse
"Harrison's first novel is a quiet yet suspenseful look at the lasting repercussions of traumatic events...[His] writing is lyrical and engaging throughout, and he does an excellent job of building tension...The First Day is an impressive debut." - Booklist
"Harrison's elegant prose and deeply felt characters create a novel with a fiercely beating heart." - Kirkus
"[A] deeply disturbing, morally challenging first novel...Harrison's remarkable writing elevates a story that is all the more powerful for its eschewing of easy answers and resolution." - Publishers Weekly
"Screenwriter Harrison's absorbing debut will surprise readers with its ingenious plot twists and nuanced characters. Though compared with the work of Albert Camus and D.H. Lawrence, Harrison's cinematic first novel stands on its own." - Library Journal
"Written with burning intensity, this is a powerful novel about marriage, passion, anger, and guilt." - Daily Mail (UK)
"Harrison's debut is a fully engaging, well-written, very imaginative novel...The early part of the novel is written in powerful poetic prose, and with the detailed analysis of emotion, the understanding of how body and mind interact, strongly reminiscent of DH Lawrence...A wonderful debut." - Irish Times
"Brilliantly written throughout...A truly excellent novel, on all counts...With tight, dispassionate, superbly controlled prose, Harrison channels the spirit of Don DeLillo or Camus...in an unflinching yet compassionate investigation of matters of the human heart and - [like] Graham Greene - the heart of the matter." - Irish Independent
"Hugely impressive. A finely written tale which is original, compulsive, and at times chilling." - Irish Examiner
"After years in the wilderness, the past decade has seen a massive upswell of literary talent emerging from Northern Ireland...Harrison writes well and brings Belfast and the sectarian conflict vividly to life." - Catholic Herald
"When you read a novel cover to cover in one day, you know it's something exceptional." - John Boyne, author of The Boy in the Striped Pajamas
"Terrific. The First Day is expanding and expanding all the time, like its own model universe…Marvelous." - Sebastian Barry, author of Days Without End, winner of the 2016 Costa Book of the Year
"Crisp, spare, lean and compelling. An auspicious debut." - Patrick McCabe, author of Booker shortlisted The Butcher Boy
This information about The First Day was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Phil Harrsion's first feature film, The Good Man, was released in 2014. His earlier short, Even Gods, won the short film award at the Belfast, Galway, and Cork Film Festivals in 2011, and was short-listed for the best short script at the 2012 Irish Screenwriting Awards. He lives in Belfast. The First Day is his debut novel.
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