The Black Pool

Reviews / Votes

This freedom is electric on the page, holding nothing back from the reader: the blackouts, the highs and lows, the bodily fluids leaked. It's all here. It's a breath of fresh air, in a world of packaged and marketed versions of ourselves, to see raw pain and perseverance. * Daily Mirror * Raw and powerful -- Books to look out for in 2025 * Irish Times * Unflinchingly honest, heart-wrenching and life-affirming -- 10 books we're looking forward to reading in 2025 * RTE * A gripping and personal story of addiction -- 2025 Books to Read * Irish Examiner * MacGabhann traces the roots of addiction and illness through his youth and childhood, writing about where he tried to find solace and what happened when everything fell apart. A vibrant, darkly humorous writer -- Non-fiction highlights for 2025 * Irish Independent * The Black Pool is an unforgettable, freewheeling masterclass of confessional writing. It's brutal and devastating, politically and intellectually engaging, and written with such verve and an unrestrained joy for language that we cannot help but be swept along with its rapacious momentum. What a book, and what an incredible testament to the potentials of the form. * Michael Magee, author of CLOSE TO HOME * I've never read anything like The Black Pool. There are spiritual echoes of William S. Burroughs and Hunter S. Thompson, and of Sylvia Plath's jocose auto-fictional revelations of her efforts to die and to live, but these sentences are all Tim MacGabhann's own, and each one is a joyful thrill. His language is flamboyant, huge, dexterous, as alive as ink on paper can be. This is a wildly brilliant account of a life lived in a struggle against terrible pain, a memoir of addiction and recovery for the ages, a stone-cold classic of the form. I was floored by the power and beauty of this book -- Donal Ryan, author of THE QUEEN OF DIRT ISLAND The Black Pool is a funny, nerve-wracking and utterly compelling memoir of addiction and literature written in a language that is entanglingly inventive, at once cool and lush, and equally capable of conjuring the most delicate sense-memory and hardest heartbreak -- Colin Barrett, author of WILD HOUSES The Black Pool is extraordinary; MacGabhann manages to be simultaneously tender, raw, profound, hilarious and horrible, guiding us through a nightmare into beautiful, hard-won wisdom -- Lisa McInerney, author of THE GLORIOUS HERESIES The profundity of The Black Pool is this: it is made out of a clarity so violent that it reminds the reader, who exists but has likely grown used to existing, how utterly strange and difficult it is to exist, and how thin is the membrane between dailiness and an abyss. An extraordinary memoir by a writer with a rare gift. I feel changed by it -- Belinda McKeon, author of SOLACE Tim MacGabhann writes with piercing honesty, humour and tenderness. Peppered with keen observations, beautiful images and perfectly placed anecdotes, The Black Pool is a memoir which revels in the personal yet speaks to a bigger, more universal sense of loss, loneliness and the need for community. Prepare to look into The Black Pool and see a little part of yourself reflected back. * Jan Carson, author of THE RAPTURES * Tim MacGabhann uses language with such striking precision and verve, I would, in all honesty, happily read him on even the most banal and benign of subjects. The Black Pool is anything but that. And don't I just love the pitiless clarity of it, the unexpected turns of tenderness, the vitality at its core? This memoir of pain, addiction - and so much more - is a reading experience of the highest order -- Wendy Erskine, author of THE BENEFACTORS The Black Pool is a bitter, truthful, painful account of life marred by addiction, and all the self-hatred it both masks and exacerbates -- Rob Doyle, author of HERE ARE THE YOUNG MEN Every sentence is a still-burning roach, flicked with glee into the face of death. Only Tim MacGabhann can break your heart like this - and give you the language to stitch it back together. I urge you to succumb to the ice-cold, visceral glory of the black pool -- Ben Pester, author of AM I IN THE RIGHT PLACE? I found this book beautiful, wild, poetical, with lashings of hilarity soaking every page and surprises leaping from every line. It's a desperately important book by a writer in the prime of their abilities. This writer shows us gruesome darkness just as he wills us to survive it all. Bravo, a shot in the arm -- Maggie Armstrong, author of OLD ROMANTICS MacGabhann has created a masterpiece... It gave me the spins... Capturing the chaos and confusion of severe suffering, especially in the realm of mental health, The Black Pool is deftly crafted... [L]iterary memoir readers craving transport to extreme terrains will find here the substance abuse equivalent of Ernest Shackleton's South. * Irish Times *