Biography
Lorcan Roche is an amazing new Irish writer, award-winning journalist and playwright, with a fan in Joseph O'Connor:
"Lorcan Roche is a fresh and vivid voice in new Irish fiction. I love the energy of his writing and its passionate engagement with the world. He is a gifted and clever storyteller."
Lorcan Roche emigrated to New York in the 1980s and worked for a year as a male nurse, then for a further two years as a travel-writer with the Reader's Digest-owned Travel Holiday magazine. On return, he worked as a news reporter, theatre critic, advertising copy-writer, magazine editor, fitness instructor and university lecturer. He has written award-winning plays for radio (ANGEL OF SUBURBIA - BBC and RTE- 1998, 1999) and stage that include HIM AND HER (2000 - Andrew's Lane Theatre and Focus Studio) and WHATEVER HAPPENED TO JOE MAGILL? (2001 - Bewley's Café theatre and Focus Theatre). THE COMPANION is his first novel.
THE COMPANION
Novel
This wonderful novel is dark and comic, with that magical lyricism the Irish do so well.
When Trevor, a cash strapped film-school dropout from Dublin washes up in New York and signs on as a companion to Ed, a rich, terminally-ill teenager, a bizarre mutual dependency pact is ignited. And an often hilarious, often disturbing, but always entertaining journey into the mind of a distinctly off-kilter Irishman begins.
Created by award-winning journalist and playwright Lorcan Roche - who worked as a companion to a terminally-ill young man in New York - THE COMPANION is a tale of madness, marginalised lives and dysfunctional families, on both sides of the Atlantic.
A story of obsession and control in which the boundaries of love and friendship are tested to breaking point, and beyond, it tackles dark themes in an upbeat, defiant, almost light-hearted vein: As Trevor himself remarks - "I like being able to make people laugh, it's like that quality of mercy thing, isn't it?"
Laying bare the secrets and lies of a 21st Century Irish family - as well as the brutality and staggering selfishness of its American counterpoint - this is a supremely entertaining, stylistically innovative book, which has already been favourably compared with Ken Kesey's ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST.
Introducing a variety of colourful and capricious characters - Trevor's academically gifted but emotionally stunted family; his wonderful, funny, but ultimately misguided Ma; Ed's morbidly obese, bed-ridden, sexually deviant mother; his apathetic, distracted father; the cold, heartless, drop-dead-gorgeous physiotherapist Trevor becomes obsessed with; the senseamalion-smoking Caribbean chef Trevor befriends -- as well as a rogue's gallery of gloriously unsavoury Manhattan females - THE COMPANION introduces a strikingly original voice in Irish fiction.
Roche has fashioned here a perversely elegiac, morally ambiguous novel that lodges in the mind long after the final page has been turned. 312pp.
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