Home Book

In Home, the year is 1968. Coorg is a small boy growing up on a Devonshire hippie commune where the I Ching is consulted whenever a decision is to be made and where the hippies talk to the vegetables they are cultivating in order to encourage better growth. According to the I Ching, Coorg's birth was an auspicious one and he is clearly destined to be a great mage, a second Merlin to lead the world into a new age. Coorg's Irish grandparents have different plans for him. They kidnap him and take him to a small town in Ireland where he is force-fed old-fashioned Catholicism in an attempt to rid him of the paganism he witnessed as a small child. Torn between the two worlds he has experienced, Coorg endures an adolescence even more confusing than most. When his mother reappears and claims that his new destiny is to discover the Holy Grail in the grounds of a ramshackle castle, the boy is obliged to find a way of breaking free of both his pasts. Frank Ronan takes aim at both the empty-headed inanities of New Age philosophy and the bigoted pieties of blinkered Catholicism and Homeis often very funny. In Coorg the book also provides a touching portrait of someone who ends up out of sync with each of the worlds he has known.--Nick RennisonRead More