Be Near Me

"O'Hagan tackles a highly charged subject with exceptional intelligence and subtlety."—The New Yorker

"Always trust a stranger," said David’s mother when he returned from Rome. "It’s the people you know who let you down."

Half a life later, David is Father Anderton, a Catholic priest with a small parish in Scotland. He befriends Mark and Lisa, rebellious local teenagers who live in a world he barely understands. Their company stirs memories of earlier happiness—his days at a Catholic school in Yorkshire, the student revolt in 1960s Oxford, and a choice he once made in the orange groves of Rome. But their friendship also ignites the suspicions and smoldering hatred of a town that resents strangers, and brings Father David to a reckoning with the gathered tensions of past and present.

"So subtle and richly hued that it calls the larger society to account. How rare to find a contemporary work . . . rise to treat a Catholic priest with something more interesting than pity or contempt or condescension . . . Be Near Me is the one of the best grown-up stories this year. It is harrowing and beautiful and worth every word." –The Plain Dealer (Cleveland)

"Be Near Me is about a man distanced from everyone, most especially himself . . . Andrew O'Hagan asks us implicitly to look at our own lives, ask ourselves how clueless we may be, as we try, with courage or cowardice or both, to get from this particular day on to the next."—The Washington Post

ANDREW O'HAGAN was born in Glasgow in 1968. Be Near Me is his third novel. His second novel, Personality, received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in London and is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books.

Discussion guide available at www.HarcourtBooks.com.

Visit www.HarcourtBooks.com/BeNearMe.