Eureka Street: A Novel of Ireland Like No Other - Softcover

Wilson, Robert McLiam

4.17

4,196 ratings by Goodreads

9781628724370: Eureka Street: A Novel of Ireland Like No Other

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1628724374 ISBN 13: 9781628724370

Publisher: Arcade Publishing, 2015

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When your street address can either save your life or send it up the creek, there’s no telling what kind of daily challenges you’ll face in the era of the Northern Irish Troubles.

All stories are love stories,” begins Eureka Street, Robert McLiam Wilson’s big-hearted and achingly funny novel. Set in Belfast during the Troubles, Eureka Street takes us into the lives and families of Chuckie Lurgan and Jake Jackson, a Protestant and a Catholic unlikely pals and staunch allies in an uneasy time. When a new work of graffiti begins to show up throughout the city OTG” the locals are stumped. The harder they try to decipher it, the more it reflects the passions and paranoias that govern and divide them.

Chuckie and Jake are as mystified as everyone else. In the meantime, they try to carve out lives for themselves in the battlefield they call home. Chuckie falls in love with an American who is living in Belfast to escape the violence in her own land; the best Jake can do is to get into a hilarious and remorseless war of insults with a beautiful but spitfire Republican whose Irish name, properly pronounced, sounds to him like someone choking.

The real love story in Eureka Street involves Belfast the city’s soul and spirit, and its will to survive the worst it can do to itself.

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Review:

Robert McLiam Wilson was born in Belfast in 1964 and that is all the biographical information the flyleaf offers. But what it really means to be a Belfast boy, both in the sixties and now, is vividly captured within its pages.

Eureka Street is set in the troubled city during the fragile cease-fires of the late 1990s. It's the story of Chuckie Lurgan, a poor, fat, Protestant boy whose life lurches from monotony into a fairy tale after his 30th birthday. Love suddenly comes in the shape of Max, an American girl whose diplomat father was killed within minutes of setting foot on Belfast soil; and money comes in the guise of a Government business loan. Good fortune almost comes via the scams of ready-to-wear Balaklava shops and leprechaun walking sticks, a running joke taken seriously by the rest of the world. Chuckie is Belfast--a mismatched dream; a battle to make something from nothing; a charmer with feet of clay.

Jake Jackson is his opposite--hard, Catholic and looking for the love that Chuckie seems to attract without trying. A realist among the bombs and roadblocks, Jake still has a poet's voice, passionate about his city- -"the air is full of regret and desire. You should stand some night on Cable Street, letting the little wind pluck your flesh ... the city will stick to your fingers like Sellotape."

This is a blissful bruiser of a book, with humour and affection drawing the painfully acute portraits together. "Chuckie's mother was a big woman, built historical, like a ship or a city ... since he had been 14 years old, he had lived in quiet dread of his mother making her mark." Addictive, triumphant, sharp, sad and witty--it's no wonder that the BBC snapped this up for a series. --Elizabeth McGregor

Review:

Eureka Street is funny and brutal and a lot more . . . a violent, angry, busy, living book.” Irish Times (Dublin)

He is one of the finest talents to emerge in Irish fiction for years.” Colum McCann

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