A Sort of Homecoming — Robert Cremins

Coming home for Christmas is a cliché Tom Iremonger hopes to explode.

After a six-month "transcontinental lost weekend" spent blowing his grandfather's legacy, Ireland's self-proclaimed Greatest Resource returns to Dublin armed only with his beloved leather jacket, a dwindling supply of Eurocheques, and a truly monstrous ego. Dublin, however, has changed. It seems, in fact, as smoothly sophisticated as Iremonger himself. Shaken, Tom finds himself violating some precious Rules of Cool--collecting for charity, cheating during the Forty-Foot Swim in the frigid Irish Sea, and above all trying (and failing) to win back Mainie Doyle, the urbane and beautiful daughter of a supermarket magnate. As he fights for his spot atop Dublin's trendy new elite, can it be that Iremonger's future is finally catching up with him? A novel of pints and posterboys, ravers and priests, semtex and sensibility, Cremins's hilarious debut―part Less Than Zero, part Look Homeward, Angel―is as much about some very old truths as it is about the new Ireland.