Andrew O’Hagan (12:15)

An incredible book ... about men and how important friendship can be to men - Douglas Stuart

In his most personal novel yet, Andrew O’Hagan (award-winning writer, three times nominated for the Booker Prize and admired for both fiction and non-fiction works) draws on a close friendship that started on a council estate in Irvine New Town but was brought to an abrupt end by death. This drove O’Hagan to put aside a fiction he was writing ‘to make some sense of those last months. and the stunning result is Mayflies, published to critical acclaim – funny and sad, heart-breaking and intimate and ultimately a story for all.

Everyone has a Tully Dawson: the friend who defines your life. In summer 1986, in a small Scottish town, James and Tully ignite a brilliant friendship based on music, films and the rebel spirit. With school over and the locked world of their fathers before them, they rush towards the climax of their youth: a magical weekend in Manchester, epicentre of everything that inspires them in working-class Britain. There, against the greatest soundtrack ever recorded, a vow is made: to go at life differently. Thirty years on, half a life away, the phone rings. Tully has news.

Mayflies is a memorial to the euphoria of youth and to everyday tragedy. A tender goodbye to an old union, it discovers the joy, and the costs, of love.

In conversation with Val McDermid who chose O’Hagan for a fantasy dinner party guest because ‘of all the people I know he has the best anecdotage’.

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