Cassie McCullough

So it's a book of two time periods and the continuation of

the great friendship between Tully Dawson and Jimmy Noodles and the gang as well.

But in that first half, I mean, we were saying we were laughing.

It's quite a hoot.

And this is, you know, a great sort of rumspringer.

It's the boys' big weekend and it becomes this legendary weekend where they're free and they're doing what they really love.

They're away working.

from the grind of their home.

And it turns out that, you know, Tully's really been doing it a bit tough.

He's really depressed by his job.

He works a lathe in a factory and it turns out that one of the other workers there has hanged himself in the canteen and it's sort of brought all these questions up for Tully about what it's all about.

And, you know, so there's this undercurrent of what their lives had really been like.

And in fact...

I mean, there's a lot of poverty in this.

Woodbine, Tully's dad, has been a miner.

They'd been striking.

And then he was sacked a month after they went back to work.

And so lots of poverty.

And actually, I might just zero in on that for a minute, Kate.

There's a moment where I'm sure that Andrew O'Hagan is referencing Seamus Heaney, the