'TEN MINUTES OUT FROM KENNEDY AIRPORT HE DISCOVERS THAT THE MAN SITTING BESIDE HIM HAS NO LEGS...'

Mervyn Kavanagh is on his way to his childhood home. After a spell of living and teaching in America, the wedding of a favourite niece takes him back across the Atlantic to Carmincross, the small Ulster town where he was born. As he journeys towards this family celebration he encounters people and events from his own and his country's past, while constant news of terrorist and counter-terrorist actions invades his consciousness more and more insistently. Somewhere, it seems, the past and the present are bound to collide...

'Even readers who know of Mr Kiely's comic gift from his previous novels may find it hard to see much scope for comedy in such material. Yet the first thing to say about Nothing Happens in Carmincross is that it is often brilliantly funny' John Gross, New York Times

'Gleefully self-mocking and hilariously funny' ... 'A novel of exile and loss that should be on every Irish bookshelf' Irish Times

'Richly, grimly funny... At its best this is a remarkable study of a man struggling to come to terms with the country he thought he'd left behind him and with his own complicity in the troubles' Margaret Walters, Observer

'I have been waiting for a novel as full of rage about contemporary Ireland as this one. And this is the book I have been waiting for' Frank Delaney, BBC World Service

'Benedict Kiely's most impressive novel' Thomas Flanagan, author of The Year of the French