Mayflies is novel about the friendship between two Glaswegian men. The first half of the novel is set in the summer of 1986 when our narrator, James, alongside four of his friends go to Manchester to watch some of their favourite bands. Andrew O'Hagan really brings this era to life, through their slang and the references they use. During the course of this freewheeling weekend they have the time of their lives, going to pubs and clubs, getting up to shenanigans, hanging out withs strangers, all the while animatedly discussing music and politics (Thatcher, the miners' strike). James, who is the more bookish and reserved of the lot, is particularly close to Tully, who is the undeniable glue that binds their group together and a wonderful friend. While this first half of the novel is all about what if feels to be young, reckless, free, and full of life, O'Hagan's characters, regardless of their age, are capable serious reflections, such as wondering what sort future awaits them and their country.
This section is so steeped in 1980s culture that I sometimes had a hard time keeping up with their banter (I am not from the UK and I'm a 90s child so I'm sure that readers who are more familiar with this era won't have such a hard time).

The second half brings us forward to 2017 when both James and Tully are in their early 50s. Here the narrative feels far more restrained, reflecting James' age. He has different preoccupations now, a career, a partner. Yet, he is recognisably still James. Tully too is both changed and unchanged. In spite of the distance between them (James lives in London now) the two have remained close friends. This latter section moves at a far slower pace, which should have been jarring but it wasn't. If anything it felt very natural. Here we have more measured meditations about life and death, questions about what we owe to the ones we love, and reconciliations with the past.
O'Hagan succeeds in uniting two very different moments of a man's life. One is an exhilarating snapshot of being young in the 80s, while the other one is more of a goodbye. I have read very few—if any—novels that focus on male friendship. So often we see portrayals that show how intimate and deep female friendships are, which is wonderful but it's refreshing to read a novel that is very much an ode to the friendship between two men. The relationship between Tully and James was incredibly moving.

Although I may have missed quite a few cultural references and Glaswegian/80s slangs, thanks to the musical education I received from my parents I mostly managed to keep up with the music front. I particularly appreciated James' literary references. I also really liked the way James would observe the character traits of those around—both as a young man and later in life—as well as his pondering about childhood, adulthood, and generational differences. His thoughtful narration was truly compelling.
Mayflies is an affecting and realistic novel examination of friendship and identity, one that I would thoroughly recommend.

Mayflies switches between two timeframes. Andrew O'Hagan cleverly juxtaposes, in the first part (1986) -  the raw spirit and delirious energy of youth with the second, (2017) and the fragility of our existence. The James/Tully friendship was very well written and I found the second part of the novel both moving and resonant. A great read.

This book is like reading two books in one. The earlier half of the novel concentrates on painting the teenage years of the protagonist and his friends and the second half focuses on the terminal illness of his best friend and how their friendship is tested. The two parts are written very differently and I preferred the second half as there were less characters. The first half is frenetic and fun, full of the energy of youth and nostalgia for the 80s and the indie music scene, but I struggled with the amount of characters. I was glad I read through to the second half though, as it was well written and an interesting read overall.

Mayflies (2020) by Andrew O'Hagan is a wonderful, heartfelt book about youth, friendship, death, and what it is to be human.

For anyone who lived through the 1980s, and enjoyed the indie music of the era, this is nigh on essential. The first part of the book embraces this era via a weekend trip to Manchester in 1986 for a group of Scottish friends. The passion and intensity of teenage life is stunningly evoked and this is clearly written from first hand experience.

In part two, we are in 2017 and we revisit some of the characters in middle age. Much has changed. I read the second part with a lump in my throat and a tear in my eye. It's moving, vivid and memorable.

Quite how Andrew O'Hagan has passed me by until now is a mystery as he has had an illustrious career. Here's what I now know...

Andrew O'Hagan was born in Glasgow in 1968 and grew up in Ayrshire. He has three times been nominated for the Booker Prize, and has won the Glenfiddich Writer of the Year Award, the Lost Angeles Times Book Award, and the E.M. Forster Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is Editor-at-Large of the London Review of Books, and is a contributor to Esquire, the New York Review, and the New Yorker. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at King's College London.

5/5

Andrew O'Hagan writes a brilliantly witty and unsentimental novel, a compassionate, sensitively relayed story of a group of friends set in two time period, examining the nature of class, friendship, life, love, loss and the impact, persistence and strength of their earlier bonds. Narrated by the quieter, but bright Jimmy, it is the summer of 1986 in Glasgow, the close group revolves around their working class, larger than life, charismatic, natural leader, 20 year old Tully Dawson, who has a remarkable capacity to love. They are on the cusp of heading out into very different futures after the end of school, music obsessives, the lyrics, their record collections, films, political discussions,the culture of that period of the 1980s, Thatcher's Britain, a time that resonated so strongly with me.

They make the decision to go to Manchester, to a Factory Records festival to mark the Sex Pistols, with acts that epitomised the 1980s. They experience a wild and unforgettable time, fizzing with energy, unrivalled joy, fervour, a strong spirit of rebellion, epitomising all that mattered to them. It is now 2017, and Jimmy is now a magazine writer, when he gets the shocking news that Tully is dying, he has cancer and he needs Jimmy. Amidst a wedding, the group are now older, different, with responsibilities, sharply contrasting with their younger selves when they had felt so invincible, a time they reflect on. Despite all the years that have passed, the strong relationships formed leave their mark, surviving, in a emotionally heartbreaking narrative of our mortality, the power of memories, male friendship, love and loss. O'Hagan develops his characters with great skill, they felt authentic, so real and so representative of that time. A memorable read that revived my memories of the time with ease. Many thanks to Faber and Faber for an ARC.

Honestly, I loved it from the very beginning and it did not disappoint with the ending either.
As the book mentions itself, it resembles the story of The Great Gatsby in a way. The narrator is a bookish, intellectual James who's life is strongly influenced by his more extravagant friend Tully, The dynamic between them changes from their adolescence to adulthood, but they are always equally important for each other.

For me, the best feature of this book was its setting. The atmosphere of Scotland in the 80s was incredibly fitting and interesting. I enjoyed all the music references as well as the political ones. Living in Glasgow myself, it was especially interesting to learn about the interests of young people of that time.

The writing style is genuine and hilarious, which suits a book about the power of friendship and value of memories so well. I was invested in the story from the beginning, wanting to know more about the characters.

Overall, I think it is a great book for almost everyone, as it deals with important issues that are presented in this beautiful story.

(4.5)

Perfectly bittersweet distillation of how it feels to be eighteen and off your face dancing to your favourite tunes with 'life' miles in the distance; the grimy grandeur and epic nonsense of it; the fearless euphoria of having nothing but bands and films and books (and occasionally, politics) to argue about. The relegation of tricky stuff to the back-burner. And then: the comedown as reality slowly chips away. But not everything is lost, O'Hagan convincingly suggests -- some things are so magic they can't fade.

I think I read this at just the right time, and have nothing but gratitude for the author for in particular a first half that spends much of its time on streets I know and have great memories of, and which is a pitch-perfect encapsulation of teen lads on the rampage. The second half offers a sad yet fitting culmination to a real triumph, hopefully and deservedly a Booker longlistee in just over a week's time.

"They say you know nothing at eighteen. But there are things you know at eighteen that you will never know again. Morrissey would lose his youth, and not just his youth, but the gusto that took him across the stage with a banner saying 'The Queen is Dead' is a thing of permanence.

Nobody at that age needs more than what Limbo McCafferty had in abundance. He had vitality. He had the spirit of resistance in that single moment. And as the final encore bristled and rose to a perfect confusion, Limbo appeared on the stage, going past crewmen and bouncers to take up residence by the drums, dancing and smiling for eternity, the crowd cheering him on and spiriting the light in his direction."

Thank you to NetGalley for an advance reading copy of this book which was given in exchange for an honest review.

A wonderfully tender book about friendship, love, life and death. O'Hagan keeps the balance beautifully between humour and a refusal to look away from the realities of mortality. James and Tully are fleshed out brilliantly as are, in the second half, their partners - and this stays on the right side of being frank without descending into either morbidity or cloying saccharine. And it's funny, wonderfully funny - just as the politicised commentary on Thatcher's Britain is spot on. So much to love about this book - just keep a tissue handy, I'd say.

I really enjoyed this. The first half gives us an intense, funny and moving depiction of a group of Scottish lads spending a weekend at the Manchester G-Mex festival in 1986. It captures beautifully the hopes, failures and (mainly musical) obsessions of young men trying on adulthood and trying to be clever, like a more wistful version of David Keenan's similarly excellent "This is Memorial Device". The second half moves to 2017 and a crisis which brings the narrator and his closest friend, Tully Dawson, together again in a period which reflects the intensity of their youth but adds mortality to the feelings of youthful immortality that characterise part 1.

There's some lovely writing here, which shows O'Hagan's range: "The band was at its height [...] with haircuts like agendas"; your connection to the music has become nostalgic, so the body is responding not to a discovery but to an old, dear echo" and O'Hagan captures beautifully captures the hunger of late teenage and the more measured nostalgia that comes later. I wasn't convinced by the slightly forced introduction of the "mayflies" motif at the end of the book but this seems a really minor mistep in an excellent novel. Great final page too.

Boys on the lash and on the loose in Manchester's summer of 1986 feature hard and fast in the first half of the book - the sort of self-obsessed banter that makes a small group of Scottish boys feel they are immortal as they experience the home of their favourite music for a wild weekend before adulthood kicks in.

The feverish and breathless recounting of a wild weekend is counterbalanced by the more elegiac exploration of how a lifelong friendship comes to its conclusion with the death of one of the friends.

For me the second half of this book redeemed the challenges I had with the first half - we all knew this bunch of teenage lads and were relieved to see that at least some of them matured over time. The genuinely touching and interesting part of the book is the telling of how early loyalties stick fast, and how true friends can be called on despite the passing of time.

The deep friendship between James and Tully is tenderly drawn and emotionally written, and is the solid core of a book that shows how some friendships can be stronger than family, stronger than love.

This is about male friendships that last a lifetime. The friendship of Jimmy and Tully is forged in their teenage years. Jimmy's parents have both abandoned him, and Tully adopts him into his own chaotic home: an act of selfless generosity. The first half of the book is about a weekend spent in Manchester with four other pals. Jimmy has a place at University. For Tully and the rest, adulthood and work is looming. The weekend spent going to two concerts and drinking vast amounts is a last hurrah. These young men escape their lives through music and quoting their favourite movies. Surprisingly, these are all good guys. There is no toxic masculinity to speak of.
If the first part of the book us steeped in drink, the second half is more sober. Jimmy gets a phone call from Tully. He needs him. The rest of the book is a celebration of their friendship under the worst and best circumstances. Jimmy has to help Tully without treading on the ties of Anna, Tully's new wife. It is a very poignant read.

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Mayflies
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Andrew O’Hagan
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Mayflies is written from the perspective of James, in two halves representing two separate periods of James’ life and era of his relationship with his best friend Tully.
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O’Hagan writes with a lot of dialogue and fast-paced conversations which I felt was a little difficult to follow with the volume of characters introduced quickly in the first half of the novel. There were also a lot of musical and film references and lyrics from songs, helping to remind you of the time period and age of the central characters, but I felt became a little overused and detracted from the story and development of the characters themselves too much.
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However, I thought the second half of the novel was brilliantly written. It was human, vulnerable and honest and O’Hagan tackled a difficult theme with sensitivity, compassion and developed this with believable endearing characters. I wish more pages had been given to this section and less on start. Or maybe fewer characters could’ve been involved in the earlier part, to allow the reader to focus on the really important relationships for later in the book.
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O’Hagan created an atmosphere of normality, with no glamorisation or lives which were shown in their dirtiest, grimiest, most genuine state. I did feel as if this book had been written visualised as a film, and feel that with the level of dialogue, musical context and product placement for the era, it does lends itself more to a screenplay, and would have been better if written as such.
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This has not yet been posted to goodreads, or Instagram but will do so in the coming days.

Review3.5 stars

I really enjoyed all the first part of this book. It made me nostalgic for the 80's with references to bands,brookside and John Peel.
It also set the basis for a friendship that would last a life time.
The second part pulls on the heart strings a lot more,but not in a overly dramatic way.
One to recommend to others.

Andrew O’Hagan has written five previous novels: his first was Booker shortlisted, his second (based around Lena Zavaroni) one Britain’s oldest literary prize (the James Tait Black Memorial), his third and fifth were Booker shortlisted (and his fourth had as its narrator the dog that Frank Sinatra gifted Marilyn Monroe). He has also ghosted an autobiography of Julian Assange. The only of his writing I have read I think is a length essay on the Grenfell Tower disaster which took up a whole issue of the LRB (where he is editor-in-chief) – an article which has proved to be controversial.

This, his sixth novel, is set over two time periods. The first is the Summer of 1986: our 18-year-old first-person narrator Jimmy (heading for a place at Strathclyde University after the intervention of an inspirational teacher) lives in Irvine New Town in Glasgow, apart from his father and mother who have walked out in turn to find themselves leading him to announce he has divorced them. Instead he spends his time with his 20-year-old friend Tully Dawson and his family. Tully is the son of a miner – “Woodbine” – still embittered by the defeat of the Miners’ Strike – a resentment he takes out on his family; and his himself a lathe turner and aspiring pop star.

The two a small group of similarly aged friends head to Manchester for the "Festival of the Tenth Summer" - a Festival organised by Factory Records to commemorate the Sex Pistols first gig in Manchester and which (and I can only quote Wikipedia here in corroboration of the shocking details in the book) felt that a line up of Morrisey, New Order and OMD was an appropriate way to pay tribute to punk.

The group are interested in films, music and in left-wing politics and their dialogue (particularly that of Jimmy and Tully) is laced through with film quotations, music lyrics and references, “name your top 3” challenges provocative banter and political discussion (albeit with an underlying heavier and more sentimental aspect to Tully’s reflections on his future and the way in which he feels trapped by what he sees as the inevitability of falling into his father’s life); and the limited action consist of music-watching, drinking, light drug taking, and half-hearted attempts to chat up girls.

The second half of the book takes place in 2017 – Tully contacts Jimmy (now a magazine writer in London) to tell him he has just been diagnosed with terminal cancer and wants Jimmy as “campaign-manager” for his last days, including helping him avoid the full indignity of a death to cancer. A set piece of the second part if Tully’s marriage (at Jimmy’s suggestion) to his partner, at which the other protagonists of the first section appear. The writing and dialogue in this section is more reflective and the action more emotional.

My biggest issue with the book I think was due to its rather conventional linear structure.

The first section I found rather repetitive and aimless at times – perhaps (if I am being honest) exacerbated by my views on the music being discussed. In the 2017 section Tibbs calls the Thatcherite Eighties “The Decade That Decency Forgot” – I have always called it “The Decade that Music Forgot", that tragic lost period between Punk and Grunge). And without knowing the cinema references one feels in the situation of this quote “I think he imagined everyone below him, all the ordinary people o the city would know the films he was quoting from, they they’d know they by heart, having somehow lived in them all their days”.

The second section while much more affecting felt a little inevitable in its trajectory.

Having read recently novels like Emily St John Mandel’s “Station Eleven” and “The Glass Hotel” which deal brilliantly with a non-linear structure, I felt that this may have been a much stronger novel if the two sections had been interleaved (with even the interleaving being non-linear within each section).

I also do not think this would have been artificial – frequently in the second section characters refer to events in the first, and matching their memories against their contemporary impressions, and also meeting characters in the past sometimes after (but sometimes before) we meet them in the present would I think have added a much stronger dimension to the book and sustained my flagging interest in each half.

Author Andrew O'Hagan and I are about the same age, so I need to begin by acknowledging that Mayflies – essentially an examination of the anatomy of a friendship and the evolution of the people in it, firmly rooted in the times they live through – perfectly captured the era and spirit of my own youth before jumping ahead to my own, less manic, present. Opening in 1986, I perfectly recognised that group of wild youth, hair spiked and bouncing off the walls, listening to New Order and Joy Division and The Smiths; that was us; that was me, and I loved every bit of the first half. The second half revisits this group of friends in 2017 – now with their jobs and their families and their mortgages – and circumstances serve to remind us that we are but short-lived mayflies on this earth; and I loved this part, too. I enjoyed every bit of the writing – the big stories and line-by-line – and while I must recognise the particular nostalgic draw this had for me, I reckon it ought to appeal widely.

Very enjoyable read, although very much a game of 2 halves. First all 80s indie and cheap speed, second middle age responsibility and anxiety. Still, O'Hahan is always worth reading

Mayflies is a compelling novel from Booker long listed author Andrew O’Hagan. It’s a story of two halves, one a vigirious stampede as a group of young men make their way from a small Scotish town to Manchester for a concert. Early on the mood is captured “I don’t want to be funny, but if we miss this we might as well be dead” and this feeling rings out throught the first phase. Its fast paced and blink and you will miss them encounters. It feels exciting, and there is great enjoyment in this. They are never anywhere long as they make their way around Manchester and the people they meet are not that important, and you know each encounter is impactful for these characters on the defining image of their youth. It seems endless and exciting until the coin is flip and the story goes to forty years later.

Then the story is given a definitive stamp and endpoint which flips the story completely. At first it was hard to ajust after the dizzing rampage of what came but it slowly mellowed and reflected into a poignant novel. It is rare that we are given a glimpse into our idolised charcters of youth grow old. Tully is the Haden Cauifield, Charlie (Perks Of Being A Wallflower) and beyond. It isn’t easy hearing the success and the failures but its authentic and that rings true in the later novel, of how these characters mould into adults and can still take charge. He is the driving force behind this novel and a character worth your time.

This really is a book of two halves. The first half centres on a group of friends who spend a wild weekend in Manchester. Although this part is crucial; for the readers' understanding as to how the friendship works it did go on a bit. I very nearly gave up as I did not know where the plot was going. Thankfully I soldiered on as the second half is a beautiful narration of a lasting friendship facing a final test. Having dragged my feet for the first half I read the second in a afternoon - the characters and emotions tugged on my heartstrings. So keep going for the fantastic second half!

Mayflies is a novel about friendship, youth, and death, as two friends live the heyday of their youth in 1986 and then deal with the harsh realities of the present. James' best friend is Tully Dawson, united by a love of music and kitchen sink dramas, and in the summer of 1986, as James leaves school, they spend a weekend in Manchester with other friends, living the dream of their lives. Thirty years later, Tully calls James with news: he has cancer, and needs someone to be the campaign manager of what he does next.

This is a novel focused on loss, both of youth and the easiness of adventure, and of an old friend, and also those lost in between. The tone is sad but also witty, and the writing makes you feel part of their old jokes and references, but also only seeing what the protagonist James wants to see. The novel feels like a quiet tragedy infused with the music of the 1980s, emulating the kind of understated domestic drama, but focusing on friendship both in the fun heyday (though, of course, there's still sadness then) and later, when nostalgia must become practicality.