Description
For a classic urban sass novel, cult hit Cartoon City by Ferdia Mac Anna is hard to beat, with its wild cast of misfits, rebels and Dublin denizens.
Anti-hero Myles seeks an out from his journo work. When he falls for the redoubtable Mia, however, he is drawn into the heart of Dublin’s underworld with some alarming – and hilarious – consequences.
First published in 2000 by Headline Books, in his forward to this special 20th Anniversary Edition, Thomas O’Grady, Director of Irish Studies at the University of Massachusetts, notes, “Cartoon City has all the ingredients of a classic ‘urban noir’ narrative … Two decades after its first publication, it continues to resonate.”
Ferdia Mac Anna’s career has brought him from comic writing to memoir, literary fiction and film direction. His debut novel was The Last of The High Kings, was originally published by Penguin in 1991 and re-published in as an Irish classic by New Island Books in 2011. Next came The Ship Inspector , published 1994 also by Penguin. He headed An Anthology of Irish Comic Writing in 1995, and he is also the author of the memoirs The Rocky Years and The Last of the Bald Heads.
This is his third novel, originally published by Headline in 2000. It romps through a comic tale of crime, passion and surreal humour at breakneck pace. With an eye for characterisation and a flair for Dublinese, it pogos along like Flann O’Brien with rock’n’roll.