I was expecting something more powerful - plot, characters, writing. Basically, it's fine but nothing more than fine. And I was looking for something compelling.

This was...underwhelming. Frankly I'm struggling to say much about it because it just didn't leave much of an impression on me. The biggest issue for me here is that this book sorely lacks a sense of interiority. We follow our protagonist, Sean, as he goes to work, makes friends, visits his mother, navigates his court case, etc., but throughout all this there is so little sense of what's actually going on inside his head. That's fine; not every novel has to be deeply introspective, but if I'm not going to get introspection, I want really strong character development work, and I didn't get that here either. I liked the interactions between Sean and his childhood girlfriend/best friend, Mairéad, but beyond that I wasn't really gripped by any of the characters or their dynamics. Overall I just found this to be a very lackluster read.

Despite his college degree, Sean Maguire is in the same socioeconomic rung as his childhood friends who didn’t pursue higher education. “We were stuck in Belfast, working in a nightclub four nights a week, with no prospects, and no chance of anything better coming our way,” he says. Worse, Sean grinds away at hundreds of hours of community service because he uncharacteristically assaulted a stranger when provoked. Scraping by on the barest minimum during a recession and dealing with dysfunctional family, Sean is every disillusioned young man. A rich debut peppered with humanity, it ends on a sliver of hope.

Thanks to Netgalley and FSG for the ebook. In this wonderful first novel, Sean has gotten his degree in literature and then done the unthinkable by moving back home to Belfast. And Sean slides right back into his old ways of hanging out with violent men, including his brother Anthony, who spend all their money on alcohol and drugs, going on benders that last days and ignoring all other responsibilities. Sean knows he needs to change and a wake-up call comes in the form of an assault charge. Sean was at a party with rich kids, and without his mates, and knocked out one of them. Having to do 200 hours of community service and having to move home to his mother’s apartment because he keeps losing jobs finally makes Sean realize he needs to change. A smart novel filled with humor and the uncovering of secrets, both old and new.

In his debut novel, Magee tells the story of 22-year-old Sean, a Belfast working class kid who graduates with a degree in English, but can't find a job due to the recession. It's 2013 and Sean is adrift, his family, friends and the whole town are haunted by what happened during The Troubles, and his class background and family trauma contribute to an atmosphere of hopelessness that our protagonist tries to fight in his own way. But it's an uphill battle: The book opens with Sean assaulting a young man after feeling diminished and ridiculed by him and his crowd at a party. Sean refuses to plead guilty and is sentenced to a high fine and 200 hours of community service, and the text covers the time it takes for him to work off his sentence while battling marginalization and coming to terms with toxic masculinity: What is his responsibility, what his agency? And how can he find a place for himself, the aspiring writer?

The organic and absorbing novel manages to negotiate various themes: There are The Troubles, which are still very much present in the biographies and conduct of many of the characters; there is the destiny of the working class, impersonated mainly by Sean's mother, an art-loving woman who fell pregnant as a teenager, is now a twice divorced mother of three and tries to get by as a cleaning lady; there are Sean's brothers who struggle with addiction and violent outbursts as well as his old mates who hardly get by and regularly escape by partying a.k.a numbing themselves; and there is Sean's struggle to fit in: He graduated in Liverpool and is now back in Belfast, torn between his old friends in the working class part of town and the Belfast college crowd, the link being his old school mate Mairéad who also crossed class lines. While it is not entirely plausible that an English graduate who supposedly chilled with the student crowd in Liverpool has now such severe habitus issues in Belfast, the feeling of being caught between class lines is in itself very well portrayed.

Much like Shuggie Bain or Trainspotting, "Close to Home" investigates a society permeated by trauma and hopelessness, and how young people cope (or don't cope) growing up in such an atmosphere - and it does so in a nuanced way: Sean is not only a victim, he is also a perpetrator and makes bad decisions. Still, as a reader, you can see where he is coming from, and you will start rooting for him (and his mother). Sean feels like no matter whether he does good and works hard or whether he fails and slacks, the outcome is the same, and there are powers that he can't overcome: Stricken by poverty so severe that he steals food to get by and repeatedly forced to change plans due to circumstance, he still decides to stay and fight, while many of his friends try to escape by leaving Belfast.

His most oppressive battle is the one against his self-loathing: Sean feels like a failure, like dirt. All the while, he is searching for his father who abandoned him, and his teenage half-sister, Aiofe - but why? He doesn't know himself, as he wants to know where his dad is, but he also hates him for the terrible things he did. Sean also fears that literature won't save him, and his terror of being right about this assumption is so severe that he hardly dares to try. The book offers quite some references to world literature, from existentialist novels over László Krasznahorkai to Marcel Proust and Milan Kundera.

This novel is definite Booker material - after Audrey Magee in 2022, Michael Magee is a must for the 2023 longlist.