A Name for Himself

'A Name for Himself' is the story of a loner, Farrell, a man who has survived a fractured childhood. He searches for love, and finds it with Grace, the daughter of his employer. But issues of class and emotional and mental fragility threaten to destroy their relationship. In his desire to protect the woman he loves, Farrell gets caught up in the violence of an obsession, and the results are catastrophic.

Catherine Dunne is the prize-winning author of nine novels, the most recent of which is 'The Things We Know Now'. She has also published one work of non-fiction, a social history of Irish immigrants in London, called 'An Unconsidered People'.

Catherine was awarded the Giovanni Boccaccio International Prize for Fiction in 2013 for her book 'The Things We Know Now', the International Prize at the Vigevano Literary Festival in Italy in 2006, and has been shortlisted for, among others, the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year Award and the Italian Booksellers' Award.

'A Name for Himself' was her second novel. It was translated into several languages and became an international bestseller.

'A virtuoso performance from a writer of enormous promise.'
Sunday Telegraph

'Highlights the exceptional and unfathomable depths of what we nonchalantly dimiss as the ordinary, the normal, the everyday. In the deft hands of Dunne, the ordinary becomes story-worthy.'
Irish Times

'Dunne writes compellingly about obsessive love, showing how apparently normal states of mind can shade into madness.'
The Times

'A startling struggle-of-love study... Dunne's Dublin dialogue is deft, her writing sings.' She

'Elegant, lucid prose... with depth, intelligence and a few surprises.'
Irish Times


Genre: General Fiction