'Brilliantly and warmly done... a major discovery.'
Kaleidoscope, BBC Radio Four
'Michael Curtin is one of Ireland's national treasures; a superb comic novelist who deserves to be far better known... Curtin's hilarity is shot through with impeccably judged moments of poignancy, even tragedy.'
Sunday Express
'Sparkling and hilarious, full of characters and lines that lovers of Michael Curtin expect... very funny and very, very human.'
Roddy Doyle
'Real comic writing, with not a dull moment.'
Times Educational Supplement
'Witty gem.'
Scotland on Sunday
'Brilliant comic novel.'
Belfast Telegraph
It all began on Good Friday 1955, when aged ten, Junior Nash and Dunstan Tucker swam each way across the bay defying the freshness of the Atlantic in spring and thereby became full members of The Cove Shivering Club. The rules were simple: you don't piss in the water and you don't bring a woman.
Years later the club members reconvene to decide how to deal with a rule-breaking woman, and indeed with modernity in general.
With its maze of comic twists and turns, The Cove Shivering Club brilliantly demonstrates Michael Curtin's wicked sense of the humorous absurd and his deeply affectionate understanding of the most human of moral frailties.
