Country

Critics Review

• A lively, convincing demotic that captures an Irish idiomatic flow and an echo of Homer’s formalities and hexametric lines. It begs to be read aloud

  The Times

• The language is enough to keep you enthralled . . . a violent pounding demotic as memorable in its way as Homer’s hexameter

  Guardian

• A bold, imaginative second novel

  The Spectator

• Energetic . . . an ingenious refitting that illuminates both conflicts

  Guardian, Books of the Year 2018

• Country explodes with verbal invention, rapid juxtaposition, brutality and fun . . . Hughes’s linguistic dexterity, his ear for dialogue, his understanding of character, the energy of his prose

  TLS

• Reading this book is like sitting in the pub listening to a good friend tell you stories. It does what only the best retellings can and makes you see the myth anew

  Daisy Johnson

• This is a hard, rigorous and necessary book which grinds out its beauty as the song cycles of empire and resistance fall silent, choked in their own blood

  Irish Times

• A brutal and gripping thriller in its own right . . . a consistently engrossing read, written in Ulster-flavoured prose as rich and evocative as you would expect from a professional thespian

  Irish Independent

• Consistently thrilling . . . By enlisting the visceral power of The Iliad to illustrate the violence of the Troubles . . . Hughes has written a striking, memorable book

  Literary Review

• Prose that crackles with the vernacular of hard men, yet remains compulsively readable throughout . . . a classic story, and a gritty contemporary thriller, this book is an extraordinary achievement

  Stuart Neville

• This powerful novel is full of blistering writing that leaps off the page and is perhaps the first great fiction about The Troubles since Dermot Healy

  Boundless

• I couldn’t put Country down. Tears through the pages at a cracking pace with sharp, smart prose and excellent dialogue

  Paul McVeigh

• Hughes has to contort some and plot elements to match the exigencies of themes such as honour, religion, slavery and warrior/royal behaviour in the 8th century pre-Christian Mediterranean world. But he does this so cleverly and audaciously that the reader goes with him – for the sheer fun of it, if nothing else . . . In a way, his colloquialised retelling (a tour de force of voice, reminiscent of the heights achieve by Patrick McCabe in The Butcher Boy) is truer to the hexameter rhythms of the original poem

  Irish Examiner

• Exceptionally good

  Books Ireland

• Clear-voiced and visceral . . . This enjoyable novel gives voice to fine characters that are challenging, selfish, brutal and worth your time

  Irish Daily Mail

• Thrillerishly bite-sized chapters hurtle towards an explosive climax

  The Observer

• Hughes brilliantly reconciles Homeric rhythms with his muscular modern idiom

  Lucy Hughes-Hallett, New Statesman Best Books of 2018

• Country struck me as this year’s most daring Troubles novel

  Ian Sansom, TLS Books of the Year