The First Day

Terrific, it is expanding and expanding all the time, like its own model universe - I just think it is pretty marvellous -- Sebastian Barry Set in a defamiliarised Belfast, The First Day is an auspicious debut - crisp, spare, lean and compelling -- Patrick McCabe, author of The Butcher Boy The First Day is an age-old story of forbidden love, given fresh resonance against the backdrop of the fractured, changing but still deeply conservative society that is contemporary Northern Ireland. Phil Harrison writes with compassion and tenderness, never veering into sentimentality, about his young Beckett scholar and the married pastor she falls in love with. He has a screenwriter's ear for the way people talk, the cadences and omissions of their speech, and in particular the speech of religious Ulster, still rooted so deeply in the language and rhythms of the King James Bible. He illuminates a people - a place - seeking to escape from itself, seeking transfiguration, but desperately bound to what has gone before -- Lucy Caldwell In true Belfast style, Phil Harrison has planted a flag. The First Day is not just a novel, it's a declaration, full worthy of salute -- Glenn Patterson