"Whereever the 'real' Ireland is or was or will be, there are great chunks of it, with the smell and texture of Irish earth, in Dermot Bolger's rich, conflicted, ferociously vital book. This is a novel full of rage and full of melancholy and full, to overflowing, of home truths."

—New York Times Book Review

"The Journey Home is an iconic novel. It deals, in a tone both tough and tender, in a style both sharp and poetic, with an Ireland emerging from the shadows of nationalism and insularity. Using brilliant characterization and drama, offering a dark vision of the public realm, full of violence and corruption, it catches the country at a key moment in its history. Its gaze is unflinching and passionate, its pages are full of fire. It is certainly the best Irish novel never released in America, but it is also one of the best Irish novels of the past half century."

—Colm Toibin, author of Mothers and Sons and The Master, which won the IMPAC Dublin Award and was short listed for the Booker Prize

"The best novel about Dublin since Joyce. . . . Hano's initiation into sleazy Dublin nightlife and Shay's fall from grace are conveyed with a compelling, even reckless, intensity."

—Irish Independent

"A film-noir of a book . . . excitingly and absorbingly told."

—Sunday Times

Young Francis Hanrahan dreams desperately of a life different from that of his country-born, suburban-living parents. On his first day at his first job Francis makes his first real friend. Shay, a would-be older brother, introduces "Hano" to Dublin's appealingly seedy after-hours bars and drug-fueled parties. They are joined by Cait, a troubled teenager who spends her days in a stupor. But the noir thrills of underground Dublin cannot conceal the unemployment, corruption, and violence strangling the city. The Plunkett brothers, masters of "the subtle everyday corruption on which a dynasty was built" will use the friends—with tragic results.

Torn between his friends, his family, and his own ideals, Hano ultimately falls victim to these powerful forces and commits a heinous crime. He flees through the countryside with Cait, wondering, as he narrates the events that set him on this path, if there is a home at the end of it.

Controversial for its gritty portrait of Dublin in the 1980s, The Journey Home is Dermot Bolger's unflinching look at the personal cost of social progress, and those, innocent or not, lost during the journey.