Allen & Unwin Getting it in the Head book Fiction English Paperback 272 pages

The celebrated and critically acclaimed debut short story collection from the winner of the 2016 Goldsmiths Prize and the Irish Book Awards Novel of the Year 2016.

McCormack's celebrated debut collection is richly imaginative, bitterly funny, powerful and original. Here we enter a world where the infatuation with death, ruin and destruction is total. Set in locations ranging from New York to the west of Ireland, and to the nameless realms of the imagination, it is a world where beautiful but deranged children make lethal bombs, talented sculptors spend careers dismembering themselves in pursuit of their art, and wasters rise up with axes and turn into patricides.

Mike McCormack is an award-winning novelist and short story writer from Mayo. His previous work includes Notes from a Coma (2005), which was shortlisted for the Irish Book Awards Novel of the Year, and Forensic Songs (2012). In 1996 he was awarded the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and in 2007 he was awarded a Civitella Ranieri Fellowship. In 2016, Solar Bones won the Goldsmiths Prize and the Irish Book Awards Novel of the Year.