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Bloomsbury Publishing has acquired Irish writer Rob Doyle’s debut novel Here Are the Young Men, first published in June 2014 by The Lilliput Press.
World English rights to Here Are the Young Men were pre-empted by Alexa von Hirschberg at Bloomsbury in a deal handled by Marianne Gunn O’Connor for The Lilliput Press.
Von Hirschberg said: “Here Are the Young Men is a fierce, shocking, blackly comic wild ride of a novel – a powerful literary statement about the lives of disaffected and disillusioned young people. Rob Doyle does for Dublin what Irvine Welsh did for Edinburgh in Trainspotting. Brave, insightful, philosophical and heartbreaking, this book introduces a talented writer at the beginning of what will be a long career.”
The novel follows friends Matthew, Rez, Cocker and Kearney as they face the void of their post-school lives. Roaming aimlessly through the city, fuelled by drugs and dark fantasies, the teenagers spiral into self-destruction, fleeing a reality they despise.
Doyle was born in Dublin and holds a first-class honours degree in Philosophy, and an MPhil in Psychoanalysis from Trinity College Dublin. His fiction, essays and criticism have appeared in the Dublin Review, the Stinging Fly, Gorse, the Moth, the Penny Dreadful and elsewhere. Having spent several years in Asia, South America, the US, Sicily and London, he now lives in Dublin. Here Are the Young Men is his first novel.
Bloomsbury will publish Here Are the Young Men in paperback in the UK and Ireland on 25th September 2014, and in the US in 2015.