The eagerly anticipated third novel from Andrew O'Hagan, one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists 2003 and author of the Booker-shortlisted 'Our Fathers and Personality'.
Be near me when my light is low, When the blood creeps, and nerves prick, And tingle; and the heart is sick, And all the wheels of, Being slow. - from 'In Memoriam', A.H.H. Alfred Lord Tennyson.
When an English priest takes over a small Scottish parish, not everyone is ready to accept him. He makes friends with two local youths, Mark and Lisa, and clashes with a world he can barely understand. The town seems to grow darker each night. Fate comes calling and before the summer is out his quiet life is the focus of public hysteria. Father David looks back to find a Lancashire childhood. He remembers a lost father and a grand school for Catholic boys. He finds 1960s Oxford in the heat of student revolt and recalls a choice he once made in the orange groves of Rome. Be Near Me is a story of art and politics, love and change, and a book about the way we live now. Trapped in class hatreds, threatened by personal flaws, Father David begins to discover what happened to the ideals of his generation. Meanwhile a religious war is unfolding on his doorstep ...
