Carry Me Down

Winner of the Hawthornden Prize and the Encore Award. This edition comes with an afterword by J. M. Coetzee.

John Egan lives with his mother, father and grandmother in rural Ireland. The Guinness Book of Records is his favourite book and he wants to visit Niagara Falls with his mother. But, more than anything, he is determined to become a world-famous lie detector, almost at any cost.

Carry Me Down is written in clean, compelling prose, and is about John's obsessive and dangerous desire to see the truth, even as his family is threatened in countless ways. In this singular tale of disturbed love every word rings true.

M. J. Hyland was born in London to Irish parents in 1968 and spent her early childhood in Dublin. She studied English and Law at the University of Melbourne, Australia and worked as a lawyer for several years. Her first novel, How the Light Gets In (2003) was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and the Age Book of the Year, and made Hyland joint winner of the Sydney Morning Herald's Best Young Australian Novelist Award.

Carry Me Down (2006) was the winner of the Encore Prize and the Hawthornden Prize, and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize (2006); while Hyland's third novel This Is How was longlisted for the Orange and IMPAC literary awards.

M. J. Hyland lives in Manchester, England, where she teaches in the Centre for New Writing at Manchester University.

'Carry Me Down is uncompromising, unputdownable and done with expert lightness. It's a work of discreet brilliance. M.J. Hyland is a truly gifted writer.' Ali Smith

'This is writing of the highest order.' J. M. Coetzee

'Hyland's talent and her power of realisation are manifest and moving...a novel that will command the world's attention.' Monthly

'Hyland writes in unadorned, clear prose, evoking period, place and setting with intense clarity and a lovely, restrained lyricism.' Australian

'Carry Me Down is a heart-rendingly domestic work full of compassion for the most ordinary of our human frailties.' Age

'Hyland's disquieting novel is feverishly alert to childhood's bewilderments and sensitively articulates the strange osmosis between the mundane and the otherworldly.' Sunday Times