The House of Slamming Doors

My name is Justin Alexander Torquhil Edward Peregrine Montague, but my father calls me 'you little bollocks', or when he is in a good mood, 'old cock'. It's 1963 in a country house in west Wicklow during the heady summer of JFK's visit to Ireland. Turbulence is in the air as Justin is locked in combat with his angry and inebriate father. A dark and poignant comedy unfolds and progresses to winter as Kennedy is assassinated and Justin ends his oedipal struggle and comes of age. Replete with the perennial tensions between native and settler, servant and master, Camelot and Leinster House, this poignant tale concerns identity and first love, and the pain of a knowing child living amongst aliens. Told with the panache of Roddy Doyle crossed with J.D. Salinger, it conveys the spirit of a bygone age and the very present emotions of a fast-growing boy. It is a masterful debut novel.

A subtler kind of Irish eccentricity pervades The House of Slamming Doors. Set at the time of President Kennedy's visit to Ireland in 1963, Mark Macauley's enjoyable tale of a dysfunctional clan of Anglo-Irish aristocrats centers on 13-year-old Justin Montague, heir to a rural estate, who enrages his bullying father by befriending a servant's daughter. But there is equal pleasure in its depiction of the time-warped world of the big house, stuck uneasily between the ears of the wind-up gramophone and the Dansette record-player.' (The Financial Times)

'The funniest, most beguiling, cruelly dysfunctional family ever.' (John Boorman)

'Packed with hilarious incident and pathos...an audacious one-off.' (The Guardian)

'This Ireland is lyrical and vibrant and honest.' (Carol Birch, The TLS)

'Packed with hilarious incident and pathos...an audacious one-off.' (Catherine Taylor, The Guardian)

'Tensions mount relentlessly...This Ireland is lyrical and vibrant and honest.' (Carol Birch, Times Literary Supplement)

'It's a cracker!' (David Elliot, Quartet Books)

'Whoopee! Amazingly, Mark Macauley's first novel. Here's hoping (it) flags the start of a whole new, stellar career.' (Rosita Sweetman, Sunday Independent, Ire)

'It is a brilliant book - fantastically funny, terribly moving, sad and just plain magic.' (Lady Emma Fellowes)

'Weird, wonderful and highly recommended...the funniest memoir I have read in years.' (Tom Widger, Sunday Tribune, Ire)

'The gentle build of pressure, the feel of a bleak sixties childhood, the ghastly parents...I loved all of it.' (John Blake, John Blake Publishing)

'A brilliant debut!' (The Sun)

'An effortless read, packed with funny incidents and peopled with deliciously eccentric characters.' (Reading Matters)

'I absolutely loved the whole thing from the first page to the last page!' (Errol Trzebinski, author)

'Macauley mines a seam of the kind of easily appealing, dark but humorous writing typified by Roddy Doyle.' (Times Literary Supplement)

'I honestly cannot remember being more enchanted, entertained and amused by any novel for decades. It is a real tour de force.' (Gerard Noel, publisher)