Brilliant, unique . . . reading fiction will never be the same again -- Roddy Doyle

The most astonishing Irish novel for many years, a masterpiece - Sunday Independent

The Butcher Boy takes Irish literature to a place it has never been before. Both familiar and extraordinary, it is the most significant novel to emerge from Ireland this decade -- Neil Jordan

An insidious, funny, breathtakingly horrific novel set in small-town Ireland, switching from mischief to madness as an adolescent obsession turns Dennis the Menace into Jack the Ripper - Observer

An intense, disturbing and original novel . . . prose which races yet lets you miss nothing -- Alan Sillitoe

Compelling, unashamedly horrible, memorable and sensitive - Times Literary Supplement

Patrick McCabe was born in Clones, County Monaghan, Ireland in 1955. He is the author of the children's story The Adventures of Shay Mouse, and the novels Music on Clinton Street, Carn, The Butcher Boy (winner of the Irish Times/Aer Lingus Literature Prize and shortlisted for the 1992 Booker Prize), The Dead School, Breakfast on Pluto (shortlisted for the 1998 Booker Prize), Mondo Desperando, Emerald Germs of Ireland and Call Me The Breeze. He lives in Sligo with his wife and two daughters.