The Sugar Sugar Café: A Novel

In a series of interlinking episodes and intertwining stories, The Sugar Sugar Cafe book looks at the lives, lived out in quiet (or not so quiet) desperation, of a cast of 'ordinary' individuals in a small town on the outskirts of Cork city in Ireland in the dark days after the 2008 financial crash. The action centres on The Sugar Sugar Café - a small, 'greasy spoon' café in Rathluirc - but encompasses other locations as far flung as Manila and New York city, as the story shifts between past and present, between comedy and tragedy, between fantasy and grim reality.

A bleak yet compelling narrative, told through the alternating perspectives of each of the key characters, hammers home the extent to which, for so many people, daily life is mostly taken up with a gruelling struggle to simply get by, and isolation and frustration are an inevitable part of the everyday routine. This sense of hopelessness is alleviated, however, by many moments of dark humour - and above all, by the rich and often surprising inner lives of these individuals, into which we as readers are given a privileged glimpse.

As the novel progresses, each character reaches their own individual point of crisis. Some will look disaster squarely in the face and manage to sidestep its worst consequences; others will plunge with a kind of fatalistic enthusiasm into fresh setback and new worlds of pain. The common denominator in all of their stories is a realisation that many of the key structures of modern society - family, church, romantic relationships, work, school, the justice system - all the things we are taught to aspire to - are woefully inadequate in helping us navigate the crushing realities of the daily grind.

Dark and yet funny, tragic and yet comic, the 'nasty, brutish and short' lives depicted in this compelling novel are rescued from despair by the deep humanity and compassion of the writer who has conceived them.

Micheal Sheehan (Micheál O'Síocháin) was born in Gorey, Co. Wexford in 1962 and grew up Co. Cork. He has lived and worked in Barcelona, Laredo, Washington DC and London, and has now returned to his hometown of Charleville. He currently works as a lecturer in accounting in LIT Limerick, and is married with three children. Since 2010, Micheal has had numerous short stories short- or long-listed for national awards, including the William Trevor award, the Over the Edge New Writer of the Year competition and the Penguin/RTE short story award. In 2017, he won the Over the Edge short story competition, as well as their New Writer of the Year 2017/8 award. The Sugar Sugar Café is Micheal's first novel