Cassie McCullough

Irish poet and Nobel laureate.

Because on the way home to Tully's house one night, where Barbara's going to make them dinner, they steal all these vegetables from the gardens on the way home.

So there will actually be some food.

And when they get there, Barbara, Tully's mum's delighted, and this newspaper comes out and she borrows a peeler from the woman next door so they can peel all these turnips and carrots to make this big

vegetable soup there's that famous poem of his Kate Clearances which is about the death of his mother Seamus Heaney's mother and there's that passage in it peeling potatoes with his mum and I was all hers as we peeled potatoes they broke the silence let fall one by one like solder weeping off the soldering iron you know they're having this moment where they're

peeling potatoes in the kitchen and then our fluent dipping knives, never closer the whole rest of our lives.

An incredible poem by Seamus Heaney, but Barbara is actually crying in this scene as they're peeling potatoes too.

So I don't know.

I mean, maybe I'm just imagining it, but it just seems so clearly a reference to that, that I think Andrew Hagen has used the

the nostalgia and the sentimentality of that incredible poem and leveraged it into the book here quite consciously.

Look, I do, and that doesn't mean I don't like it.

I actually do really like this novel, but I think there's a lot of telling us how to feel in it.

For example, this line, when people asked you why he was so often the best man at weddings, it was clear they hadn't known Tully Dawson in his prime.

Other guys were funny and brilliant and better at this and that, but Tully loved you.

I mean, we're kind of being told what to feel sometimes.

And that comes from a sense of Andrew O'Hagan wanting to capture this unbelievable real person and also this fictional character and give us that love and that wonderful sense of a friendship that was one for the ages.

And almost, I think, in doing so, he's so committed to his mission that sometimes he doesn't let us be, as readers say,

picking up our own cues.

Well, he's really nailed a time and a place and a set of music.

I mean, it's almost a little bit Nick Hornby.