Close to Home

Close to Home follows Sean Maguire, a recent graduate back in West Belfast, who makes one bad decision outside a house party and finds himself tangled in the justice system, money problems, and the chaos of his friends’ hard-partying lives. Between his mother’s small comforts, his brother’s spirals, and the tenderness and tangle of reconnecting with Mairéad, Sean wrestles with class, masculinity, trauma, and the cost of escape. He stocks bars, dodges landlords, works community service among graves, and tries not to drown in coke, court fees, and the ache of a city that shapes and tests him. By the time he moves into a cheap room near Queen’s, he’s still skint but carrying a different kind of wealth: a clearer eye, a fragile plan, and a soft but steady way forward.

• Listeners who love gritty, compassionate literary fiction set in real places
• Anyone interested in post‑Troubles Belfast and working‑class coming‑of‑age stories
• Fans of books about friendship, family secrets, and starting over without neat endings

Michael Magee is the fiction editor of The Tangerine and a graduate of the Creative Writing PhD program at Queen’s University Belfast. His work has appeared in Winter Papers, The Stinging Fly, The Lifeboat, and The 32: An Anthology of Irish Working‑Class Voices. Close to Home is his first novel.