by David McGrath
published September 2027
Meet The Crack: last of the old-school alcoholics and the worst sheep farmer in Ireland.
After making an ill-conceived and drunken bet that he will win the local donkey derby, putting his farm on the line, The Crack must yoke, tame and train the Untameable Donkey to victory. Unfortunately, things keep spiralling out of control: a traumatised nun begins a fierce temperance movement, spawning an even fiercer backlash; satanists descend upon the small town of Ballybalt; the severed head of Oliver Cromwell is disinterred and The Holy Foreskin is stolen. With the whole world now watching, a consensus forms that the winner of The Ballybalt Donkey Derby is to be the Second Coming of Christ. Before long, the Vatican weighs in – not with a condemnation, but with an entry.
Wild, bawdy, and blasphemous, Donkey Christ is a gleeful collision of the sacred and profane. And yet beneath the chaos, something wounding and melancholy: a story about inheritance, pain, and the destructiveness of male friendships. Described as The Banshees of Inisherin meets Uncut Gems, or Kevin Barry on acid, this novel is quite unlike anything else you have read before – and it announces the arrival of a major new prose stylist.
‘Dark, slapstick and almost cartoonish quality, in the best possible way, with the manic energy of a folk tale and yet does something with narrative in the blink of an eye to make it more real than most literary realism.’ Colin Barrett
‘Genuine imaginative verve and style, a singular voice indeed.’ Mike McCormac