OUR STORE IS CLOSED ON ANZAC DAY: THURSDAY 25 APRIL
Michael Hughes was born and raised in Keady, Northern Ireland, and now lives in London. He attended St Patrick's Grammar School, Armagh, and read English at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He trained in theatre at the Jacques Lecoq School in Paris, and has worked for many years as an actor, under the professional name Michael Colgan. He studied creative writing at Royal Holloway, and at London Metropolitan University, where he also taught. The Countenance Divine is his first novel.
This is an intricate and densely allusive novel . . . It marks the arrival of a considerable talent * Guardian * A novel of big ideas that flows, and reads, like a dream. Solid yet sinuous, and very satisfying * Gavin Corbett * A strange, witty and dazzlingly clever fable on art, ambition and morality -- Sarah Perry * Guardian * A virtuoso performance from a writer of quite prodigious gifts: an astonishingly accomplished first novel * Glenn Patterson * The Countenance Divine moves effortlessly from deadpan humour and visceral demotic to the soaring language of the visionary. An ambitious and persuasive debut * Rupert Thomson * A fascinating chimera of a novel, hallucinatory and compelling * Jo Baker * Michael Hughes writes like a brilliant cross between David Mitchell and Hilary Mantel * Toby Litt * Wonderfully ambitious . . . There is real pleasure to be derived from Hughes's imagination, especially his instinct for tactile description . . . a novel of the spirit made flesh, pulsating with blood and guts * Times Literary Supplement * Sumptuous . . . A gloriously extravagant novel. Strange yet compelling * Irish Examiner * An intriguing broth of a first novel . . . The author swoops between four centuries with considerable chutzpah . . . Hughes is thoroughly in control of his material * The Times * The Countenance Divine is never less than superbly stimulating. It is a debut of high ambition that marks the arrival of a considerable talent * Guardian *
