Be Near Me

By Andrew O'Hagan. This book is even better the second time. Look for it in hardcover in June when it comes out from Harcourt.

Particularly loved this passage:

“There’s a way of feeling homesick, not for any house, not for any particular place, but just feeling homesick as a manner of being alive, every day a sense of existing in exile from a place where you might belong. The Germans have a word for it: Heimweh.”

It'd be lazy of me to say this is about a gay priest involved in a sex scandal within the Catholic Church. Plus, it would probably turn you off to reading it. But since I am feeling pretty lazy, I hope this short description and another passage will entice you to pick up the book this summer. I would say it's really about a lonely man who moves to a place where he's not welcome. It's about being a foreigner, not just in the place you live, but to yourself, as well.

See how well O'Hagan describes his characters:

“Everything about Nashe was the opposite of hostile: he wore round tortoise-shell glasses, a succession of green cardigans, he liked booze and was forever shaking his watch at his ear, waiting for time to move on and jokes to improve.”

And this:

“I see Conor reaching into the crowd with a smile as large as the decade that made him. I see the great hope on his face and his readiness to invent the air one might breathe. At night, I sometimes see him driving down to the place where the River Wye runs through a valley in Buckinghamshire. I hear his sacred heart and see his eyes closing as he falls asleep. And I say: be near me. "