New novel from Nenagh writer

The latest work from award-winning Nenagh writer Julian Gough has been attracting a lot of media attention as he explores what connection – both human and otherwise – might be in a digital age.

Set in Nevada, 'Connect' follows biologist and single mother Naomi, who worries about the impact her ground-breaking research might have on the world. And of the impact the world might have on her painfully awkward, home-schooled, ever-growing teenage son, Colt.
Colt is so brilliant he can code virtual realities our world hasn’t even thought of yet; and so socially inept that he struggles to order takeaway pizza. When Colt secretly sends his mother’s breakthrough research paper to a biotech conference in New York, and the conference is closed down, Naomi’s worst fears come true.

Colt’s father crashes back into their lives, backed by the secretive security organisation he heads. The US government wants Naomi’s research... and Colt. Colt will soon have to leave the comfort of his virtual reality world, and face the challenge of discovering who he really is.

And Naomi will have to decide how far she will go to protect her child. Would she kill a man? Would she destroy the world?
Julian, son of Richard and Betty Gough, and a past pupil of St Joseph's CBS in Nenagh, won the British National Short Story Award in 2007. He has lived in Berlin for many years, and in a recent interview with the Irish Times said he “couldn't have written this book living in Ireland”.

“To write the stuff you’re fully capable of, you have to feel you can let rip without worrying about how the village is going to feel about that, or your mother, or Ryan Tubridy,” he said “You end up self-censoring just because that’s the human and correct thing to do in a village.”

'Connect' took Julian seven years to write. Described as a “'humble' new book modelled on 'Terminator 2' and 'Aliens'”, its publication is both topical and poignant. “We’re getting to a point where human beings are losing control of the consequences of the decisions they make about their technologies. You see it with Cambridge Analytica all over the news,” Julian told the Times.

“I felt there was a missing link between the great novels of technology and the future, and the great novels of humanity and the present. If you could somehow do both, you’d have something amazing. And that is something I tried to do with 'Connect'.”

The novel is reviewed by the Times as “laboured and inelegant, yet full of tantalising intelligence. The questions it poses are magnetic and arresting. What, the book asks, are we to make of our inability to live now? What is the significance of the human attachments we are unable to perceive?”

Described by his fellow Nenagh author Donal Ryan as “a work of genius” and by Joseph O'Connor as “a tour de force”, 'Connect' by Julian Gough is out now and avilable in local bookshops