Synopsis
"Always trust a stranger," said David’s mother when he returned from Rome. "It’s the people you know who let you down."
Half a life later, David is Father Anderton, a Catholic priest with a small parish in Scotland. He befriends Mark and Lisa, rebellious local teenagers who live in a world he barely understands. Their company stirs memories of earlier happiness—his days at a Catholic school in Yorkshire, the student revolt in 1960s Oxford, and a choice he once made in the orange groves of Rome. But their friendship also ignites the suspicions and smoldering hatred of a town that resents strangers, and brings Father David to a reckoning with the gathered tensions of past and present.
In this masterfully written novel, Andrew O’Hagan explores the emotional and moral contradictions of religious life in a faithless age.
The Washington Post - Carolyn See
Be Near Me is about a man distanced from everyone, most especially himself. He's utterly bewildered by life and how he should live it. But he's just as human as we are. Exactly as human as we are. Andrew O'Hagan asks us implicitly to look at our own lives, ask ourselves how clueless we may be, as we try, with courage or cowardice or both, to get from this particular day on to the next.