Breakfast on Pluto - Peter McCabe

Set in Ireland in the 1970s, Breakfast on Pluto follows the exploits of Patrick “Pussy” Braden, an endearing but deceptively tough young man.
Abandoned as a baby in his small Irish hometown and aware from a very early age that he is different, Patrick survives this harsh environment with the aid of his wit, charm and a sweet refusal to let anyone or anything change who he is.

This is a surreal and magical tale, a funny, moving and poignant rites of passage novel. It is also a vivid and unsettling comment on the human price paid in the cultural and political climate of Ireland at that time. 'Wild, hilarious, merciless and fiendishly clever' Independent on Sunday 'He is the fortunate possessor of a savage and unfettered imagination; his books . . . dissect life's miseries with a gleaming comedic scalpel' The Times 'It finds humour in places that other writers are afraid to look for it' Sunday Telegraph 'This is a savagely funny and authentically tragic novel of an Ireland in unhappy transition and beneath McCabe's perfectly delivered black comedy lies an angry heart' GQ

Amazon.com Review

Patrick McCabe hit pay dirt with his third novel, The Butcher Boy, which was short-listed for the 1992 Booker Prize, filmed by Neil Jordan, and acclaimed as "a masterpiece of literary ventriloquism." In his fifth, Breakfast on Pluto, also on the Booker shortlist, McCabe produces another inimitable voice to amuse and infuriate, mimicking perfectly the overwrought, near-hysterical style of a character whose emotional processes were cruelly halted somewhere around the age of 14, and whose tale requires English literature's highest concentration of exclamation marks.

Patrick "Pussy" Brady is recording her memoirs for the mysterious Dr. Terence, and it's quite some story. After randy Father Bernard gets carried away with his temporary housekeeper, a dead ringer for Mitzi Gaynor, the result is Patrick Braden, abandoned on a doorstep in a Rinso box and condemned to a foster home with the alcoholic Hairy Braden. Escape comes in fantasies of Vic Damone and the occasional glitzy frock, and eventually, inevitably, the rebaptised "Pussy" heads for life as a transvestite rent boy on Piccadilly's Meat Rack. But this is not just Pussy's story; as hitherto-muffled paramilitary violence blows up in her face, Pussy falls apart, providing a vivid and unsettling final comment on the human price paid in 1970s Ireland. --Alan Stewart