'Are you going into town today?' she says, which annoys me because it's something she says all the time, having forgotten she said it before, and I say, 'Jesus, Mum, not this again,' and she says, 'What again?' and I say, 'Town is shut down,' and while she can see I am upset and wants not to upset me like this, she is also wounded by my tone, and I am ashamed then and can only look at my plate, and I decide not to bring up what I intended to bring up, about the past, and about my need for her to apologise for it.Gavin is spending the quarantine in a small flat in south Dublin with his eighty-year-old mother, whose mind is slowly slipping away. He has lived most of his adult life abroad and has returned home to care for her and to write a novel. But he finds that all he can write about is her.Moving through a sequence of remembered rooms — the 'cells' — Gavin unspools an intimate story of his upbringing and early adulthood: feeling...

Against the backdrop of China's Cultural Revolution and Europe's sexual revolution, the fates of two families in London and Beijing become unexpectedly intertwined, in this dazzling new novel from the author of Mrs Engels.Revolution is a Family Affair.In London, sisters Iris and Eva, members of a radical performance collective, plan an attack on the West End theatre where their mother is playing the title role in Miss Julie. Meanwhile in Beijing, Jiang, Chairman Mao's wife, rehearses a gala performance of her model ballet, The Red Detachment of Women, which she will use in order to attack her enemies in the Party.As the preparations for these two astonishing performances unfold, Iris, Eva, and Jiang are transformed into unforgettable protagonists in a single epic drama. The three 'sisters', although fighting very different personal battles, find themselves bound together by the passions of love, by the obsessions of power, and by the...

Longlisted for The Guardian 2015 First Book Award“Richly imagined."—starred review, Publishers Weekly“This is the best kind of historical fiction."—Lucy Scholes, The Independent"Who knew reading about communists could be so much fun?"—starred review, Kirkus ReviewsVery little is known about Lizzie Burns, the illiterate Irishwoman and longtime lover of Frederick Engels, coauthor of The Communist Manifesto. In Gavin McCrea's first novel, the unsung Lizzie is finally given a voice that won't be forgotten.Lizzie is a poor worker in the Manchester, England, mill that Frederick owns. When they move to London to be closer to Karl Marx and family, she must learn to navigate the complex landscapes of Victorian society. We are privy to Lizzie's intimate, wry views on Marx and Engels's mission to spur revolution among the working classes, and to her ambivalence toward her newly...