BE NEAR ME -A NOVEL

"Always trust a stranger," said David’s mother when he returned from Rome. "It’s the people you know who let you down." Half a life later, David is Father Anderton, a Catholic priest with a small parish in Scotland. He befriends Mark and Lisa, rebellious local teenagers who live in a world he barely understands. Their company stirs memories of earlier happiness—his days at a Catholic school in Yorkshire, the student revolt in 1960s Oxford, and a choice he once made in the orange groves of Rome. But their friendship also ignites the suspicions and smoldering hatred of a town that resents strangers, and brings Father David to a reckoning with the gathered tensions of past and present. In this masterfully written novel, Andrew O’Hagan explores the emotional and moral contradictions of religious life in a faithless age.

From the New Yorker: "David Anderton, a fifty-six-year-old English priest in a gritty Scottish town, comes from a long line of Catholic martyrs, but he himself has settled for quieter satisfactions: good Alsatian wines, Chopin Nocturnes, banter with his housekeeper about the twelfth-century roses in the garden. Then, one Good Friday, he encounters Mark and Lisa, two charismatic juvenile delinquents at the local Catholic school, and he's drawn to them like a moth to fire. O'Hagan tackles a highly charged subject with exceptional intelligence and subtlety. Father Anderton's voice can be arresting even when he's describing heartburn ("I felt an empty, dyspeptic scorch as I drove to the school, like a rising argument at the center of my chest"), and our growing intimacy with his inner voice describes its own arc of seduction and betrayal. No one gets off easily here, and yet the corruptions revealed are not necessarily the expected ones: as O'Hagan reminds us, the variety of deceptions we practice on ourselves and others is almost infinite."

Paperback

English Language

Harvest Book Publisher