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It was February 2020 when Ed O’Loughlin unexpectedly heard that Charlotte, a friend from the old days, had just died young and before her time. He realised that he was being led to reappraise his life, his family and his career as a foreign correspondent and novelist in a new, colder light.
This search for meaning becomes the driving theme of O’Loughlin’s year of confinement. The result is a haunting examination of the author’s early life and love, the journalists and photographers with whom he covered wars in Africa and the Middle East, the suicide of his brother, his new work as an author, a family home on the edge of a graveyard, and the mysteries of memory, ageing and loss.
Moving, funny, and searingly honest, The Last Good Funeral of the Year takes the reader on a circular journey from present to past and back to the present: ‘Could any true story end any other way?’
Ed O’Loughlin was born in Toronto, Canada, and grew up in Kildare town, Ireland. After studying English at Trinity College Dublin, he worked as a reporter. His first novel, Not Untrue & Not Unkind was longlisted for the 2009 Man Booker Prize and shortlisted for the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award. His second novel, Toploader, a darkly comic vision of the ‘war against terror’, was published by Quercus in 2011. His third novel, Minds of Winter (2016), was a finalist for the Giller Prize and longlisted for the Sir Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction. His fourth novel, This Eden, a tech thriller, was published in 2021. He lives in Dublin with his wife Nuala Haughey and two children.