Be Near Me

A generous, wonderfully observed novel, and the best O'Hagan has written yet; it is also one of the few truly essential works of fiction to emerge from this country during the past 20 years or more.

One of the novels of the year.

Humour is a component of this novel's great humanity. O'Hagan is devastatingly amusing (rare enough), but even more unusually he eschews barbs, cruelty and gratuitous showing-off. ... Be Near Me establishes O'Hagan as one of our most sympathetic prose-poets. His talent is comparable to Muriel Sparks's, and he is kinder.

A sensitive and poignant meditation on human isolation, Andrew O'Hagan's new novel is set in a small, forlorn community on Scotland's west coast ... First-rate writing and Chekhovian undertones capture a fractured society in which people are left without purpose, floundering in pools of their own isolation.

O'Hagan employs many elements present in his first novel, Our Fathers, though reassembles them in different shapes here. The resulting patterns are complex and subtle.

A work that portrays tragedy with such intelligence, tenderness and honesty ... There are no cliches in this book ... The language is precisely attuned to the circumstances, it is felt rather than imposed, so the story seems to be released by it instead of merely enabled, like a piece of music in the hands of a virtuoso musician. Time and again, unobtrusive phrases and rhythms elegantly conjure resonances: the children with their 'small energies of disdain' ...