The Rye Man

Returning to rural Northern Ireland for a fresh start, John Cameron takes on the role of headmaster at his old primary school. But as dark memories are disturbed and his marriage falters, Cameron is left feeling powerless in this fractured community. Driven by unresolved grief and tormented by his waking dreams, he is forced to confront his past as he struggles to prevent history from repeating itself.

David Park has written eight previous books including The Big Snow, Swallowing the Sun, The Truth Commissioner and, most recently, The Poets' Wives. He has won the Authors' Club First Novel Award, the Bass Ireland Arts Award for Literature, the Ewart-Biggs Memorial Prize, the American Ireland Fund Literary Award and the University of Ulster's McCrea Literary Award, three times. He has received a Major Individual Artist Award from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland and been shortlisted for the Irish Novel of the Year Award three times. In 2014 he was longlisted for the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award. He lives in County Down, Northern Ireland.

To write well about Ulster while keeping terrorism from monopolising the foreground is infinitely hard. This wise, sincere, troubling novel shows how it should be done The Times To pull off this sort of story satisfactorily demands a skill in timing and a clarity in presentation which are beyond most novelists: but Park doesn't put a foot wrong Sunday Telegraph Park is an excellent writer; psychologically astute, lyrically unflinching Daily Telegraph One of the shrewdest observers of the way we live Independent