Cells: An evening with Gavin McCrea

‘Cells is a compulsive tidal force of a book: detailed, vulnerable, and brave, it pulled me in swiftly and held me to the very end.’ — Seán Hewitt, author of All Down Darkness Wide

Gavin McCrea's critically acclaimed fiction - Mrs Engels and The Sisters Mao - has enthralled our booksellers. Now he brings us a remarkable, arresting memoir in Cells.

‘A life recollected in vivid scenes, Cells is both brutal and tender in its depiction of the relationships that shape a self. Leading the reader through moments of darkness and of luminosity alike, this is a work of intellect and eloquence, but also a work of great heart." — Doireann Ní Ghríofa, author of A Ghost in the Throat

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 out of place in the insular suburb in which he grew up, the homophobic bullying he suffered at school, his brother’s mental illness and drug addiction, his father’s sudden death, his own devastating diagnosis, his struggles and triumphs as a writer, and above all, always, his relationship with his mother. Her brightness shines a light over his childhood, but her betrayal of his teenage self leads to years of resentment and disconnection.

Now, he must find a way to reconcile with her, before it is too late. Written with unusual frankness and urgency,

Join us for an uncovering of filial love and its limits, and a discussion of coming to terms with separation and loss with a tremendous storyteller.

‘Reading Cells, I was struck by McCrea’s generosity in interrogating personal histories as they relate to wider familial and social systems. Contemplating devotion and loss with revolutionary sensitivity, what results is a stunning work of emotion-mapping. Cells is a dazzling exploration of nuance; pondering the formative threads that piece together the self, sewing a new lineage of interconnectedness towards acceptance.’ — Peter Scalpello, author of Limbic