Beyond. This item is unavailable.Beyond

An inexperienced young accountant, just qualified and planning to move to a major metropolis, is temporarily lured by Marie ('an intoxicating cocktail of gaiety, mischief and sensuousness') to a small town in Northern Ireland where he is further bewitched by the atypical Helen. Captivated by two such different but fascinating women, he allows himself to become entangled in various aspects of small town life - its venal businessmen, imperious family women and cynical seducers ('If ye tell women ye're in love they cry and then ye can ride them'). Displaying the characteristics of Michael Foley's earlier novels - style, wit, psychological insight, sharp dialogue and convincing characterisation - Beyond is a tale of young men and women attempting to transcend by means of sexual experimentation their humdrum lives in the Northern Ireland of the sixties, when new ideas began to unsettle the ancient certainties and the generation gap became two centuries wide.

Michael Foley was born in Derry in 1947.

He was joint editor of The Honest Ulsterman from 1970 to 1971 and contributed a regular satirical column, ‘The Wrassler’, to Fortnight magazine throughout the early 1970s.

His first collection of poetry, True Life Love Stories, was published by Blackstaff Press in 1976, followed by The Go Situation in 1982 and Insomnia in the Afternoon in 1994. He has also published a collection of translations of French poetry and four novels. The Guardian described his book The Age of Absurdity: Why Modern Life Makes it Hard to be Happy as 'a work of admirable scope ... energetic, witty and erudite' 

Formerly a lecturer in Information Technology at the University of Westminster, Michael is now retired and lives in London. 

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