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Published Oct 2013
272 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
A sophisticated and touching novel of a father and son reconnecting in a foreign place, from the award-winning and bestselling author of What Was Lost
Retired bus driver and recent widower Dermot Lynch grabs his bags from the bus's dusty undercarriage and begins to climb the hill to his son's house. It is Dermot's first time in Spain and the first time he's been out of Birmingham in many years. When he finally arrives at the gates of the crumbling development, Dermot learns that Eamonn, only one of a handful of settlers in the half-finished ghost town of Lomaverde, has fallen prey to an alluring vision and is upside down in a dream that is slipping away.
But Dermot finds something beautiful and nostalgic in Lomaverde's decline - something that is reminiscent of his childhood in Ireland. Soon he is the center of attention in the tiny group of expats where paranoid speculation, goat hunting, and drinking are just some of the ways to pass the days. As the happenings in Lomaverde take a strange turn, father and son slowly begin to peel back their pasts, and they uncover a shocking secret at the heart of this ad hoc community.
With the depth, grace, and wry authenticity that have characterized Catherine O'Flynn's previous work, Mr. Lynch's Holiday gives us a story that again shimmers with "the power of good old realism" (Jane Smiley, The LA Times) about love, connection, and a father and son finding each other exactly when they need it most.
BookBrowse Review
"Mr. Lynch's Holiday contains no sliver of light. Its characters are simply living in suspended animation. Imagine a merry-go-round with no music, where the horses have been replaced with blocks of cement, and it goes around and around so slowly and so torturously. That's what Mr. Lynch's Holiday felt like to me. It's elegiac, but too much of that can sink a book." - Rory L. Aronsky
Other Reviews
"Like her characters, O'Flynn has an eye for the beauty to be found amid squalor and chaos. " - Publishers Weekly
"Starred Review. Overflowing with warmth and compassion as well as a sly humor, this skillful novel will appeal to fans of Richard Russo and Francine Prose." - Booklist
"Starred Review. As she did so wonderfully in her first two novels...O'Flynn brings compassion, charm, and understated humor to a story that will appeal to devotees of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and Helen Simonson's Major Pettigrew's Last Stand. - Library Journal
"A low-key vignette of family life, appealing but not memorable." - Kirkus
"Brilliantly rendered… O'Flynn's tender portrait of an Irish emigrant of the hard-done-by, hard-working generation of the 60s and 70s – a "proper Paddy", as Dermot calls himself – balancing the books of his life with such generosity and intelligence, is a lovely thing." – The Guardian (UK)
"A simple story but, thanks to a balance of humour and pathos, a delightful one… A rare love story between a father and a son." –Telegraph (UK)
"O'Flynn writes with brilliant wit and warmth about people cast adrift in contemporary wildernesses..." - The Times (UK)
"Ms. O'Flynn is a remarkable and original writer…tenderness, warmth, thoughtfulness and comic genius are words that are flung around a lot, but it's more than that. She flinches at nothing." - Observer (UK)
This information about Mr. Lynch's Holiday 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.
Catherine O'Flynn, the youngest of six children, was born in Birmingham in 1970 to Irish parents. Her father was a newsagent, her mother a teacher.
Prior to the publication of her first novel she did a variety of jobs including web editor, box office assistant, deputy manager of a large record shop, civil servant, post woman, teacher and mystery shopper.
Her debut novel, What Was Lost, won the Costa First Novel Award, was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, and longlisted for the Booker and Orange Prizes. She was named Waterstone's Newcomer of the Year at the 2008 Galaxy British Book Awards.
Her second novel The News Where You Are, published in 2010, was shortlisted for the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize, an Edgar Allen Poe Award and was a Channel 4 TV ...
... Full Biography
Author Interview
Link to Catherine O'Flynn's Website
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