“An exceptional debut novel. […] Falling Animals is a masterpiece.” – Olivia Fitzsimons, author of The Quiet Whispers Never Stop

“Supple, rich and demotic – Kneecap meets Chekhov – no one else is doing this.” – Louise Kennedy, author of Trespasses

With unsparing, unsettling, and unforgettable style, two debut novelists approach the complex nature of home, community, and what we leave behind.

Sheila Armstrong (Falling Animals) and Michael Magee (Close to Home) dive headlong into the relationships that shape us and the legacies we create for ourselves. Sometimes dark and often raw, neither of these up and coming writers shy away from the hardness of humanity.

On an isolated beach, an unknown stranger is found dead. Told through a chorus of voices, Falling Animals follows the crosshatching threads of lives true and imagined, real and surreal, past and present.

In Close to Home, Sean returns from university only to find himself trapped between the hard world of working-class Belfast he thought he left behind, and a new world held just out of reach.

Join Armstrong and Magee in conversation with journalist and author Patrick Freyne.

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Sheila Armstrong grew up in the west of Ireland and is now based in Dublin. Her first book of short stories, How To Gut A Fish, was published to great acclaim in 2022

Michael Magee is the fiction editor of The Tangerine and a graduate of the PhD Creative Writing programme at Queen’s University, Belfast. Close to Home is Magee’s first novel.