Cells

- Blurb -

' Are you going into town today? ' she says, which annoys me because it' s something she says all the time, having forgotten she said it before, and I say, ' Jesus, Mum, not this again,' and she says, ' What again? ' and I say, ' Town is shut down,' and while she can see I am upset and wants not to upset me like this, she is also wounded by my tone, and I am ashamed then and can only look at my plate, and I decide not to bring up what I intended to bring up, about the past, and about my need for her to apologise for it. 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, Cells is at once an uncovering of filial love and its limits, and a coming to terms with separation and loss.