Announcing a heartbreaking new novel of a lifelong friendship by Andrew O’Hagan.

We’re delighted to announce that Mayflies will be published on 3 September 2020 in the UK.

Everyone has a Tully Dawson: the friend who defines your life.

In the summer of 1986, in a small Scottish town, James and Tully ignite a brilliant friendship based on music, films and the rebel spirit. With school over and the locked world of their fathers before them, they rush towards the climax of their youth: a magical weekend in Manchester, the epicentre of everything that inspires them in working-class Britain. There, against the greatest soundtrack ever recorded, a vow is made: to go at life differently.

Thirty years on, half a life away, the phone rings. Tully has news.

A tender goodbye to an old union, Mayflies is a novel about a lifetime’s loyalty and the joy and the costs of love.

‘Full of the euphoria of discovering the world with your best friend, then laced with the pain of bidding that world farewell, Mayflies is a novel of the deepest emotional resonance – a profound heartbreaker from the most dextrous literary talent.’ Alex Bowler, Publisher.

‘There is no page on which there is not something surprising or quotable or pleasurable or thought-provoking . . . there is so much in it that is sharp and so much that is sad.’ Hilary Mantel, on Be Near Me

‘O’Hagan has cast a shimmering light on love and memory, life and loss and on the secrets we keep from those closest to us, sometimes even from ourselves.’ Elizabeth Day, on The Illuminations

Andrew O’Hagan is one of the most exciting chroniclers of contemporary Britain and author of six works of fiction. He has been nominated for the Booker Prize and was voted one of Granta‘s Best of Young British Novelists in 2003. O’Hagan has won the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He is Editor-at-Large of the London Review of Books. He was born in Glasgow and now lives in London.