McCormack’s celebrated debut collection is richly imaginative, bitterly funny, powerful and original. Here we enter a world where the infatuation with death, ruin and destruction is total.

Set in locations ranging from New York to the west of Ireland, and to the nameless realms of the imagination, it is a world where beautiful but deranged children make lethal bombs, talented sculptors spend careers dismembering themselves in pursuit of their art, and wasters rise up with axes and turn into patricides.