Excerpt from Tender by Belinda McKeon, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Extraordinary. Tat was what they were. Tat was a James word; that was one of the words she had got, over this summer, from James. From all the talking they had done, firstly in Dublin, those intense days after he had returned from Berlin, and then—after Catherine had returned to her parents' home in Longford for the summer and James had reclaimed his old Baggot Street bedroom—over the phone, James had given her so many new ways of saying things, so many closer, sharper, more questioning ways of looking at the world. They had talked on the phone almost every evening this summer; Catherine would call the pay phone in the hallway on Baggot Street, and James would be there waiting with a cheery hello, and they would be off, sometimes for hours, and in those conversations James had given her so much, so many new things to think about. And so many new things to worry about—or, not new things, just things it had never really occurred to her to think about before. Like how little she knew about, well, everything, really. That had been obvious all this past year—college had made that obvious—but James, her conversations with James, had forced her to see it so much more clearly. James had not said this to her directly—James was not like that, not blunt in the way that, say, her classmate Conor was, ripping the piss out of her, making her feel humiliated and small. It was more that in talking to James, listening to him talk, Catherine had come to realize just how much more carefully she needed to think about everything, about her life, about what she was doing with it, about what she was doing at college,about what she was doing with the summer days. About her relationships, of which there were none; conor was not a relationship, no matter what James said, however often or hilariously—she loved the way he insisted on talking about the dramas of her life as though they were actually interesting, as though there was actually something happening where there absolutely was not. She even loved when he insisted on talking about the relationship with her parents, which was something she had never even thought about in such terms before— she really needed, James had told her, to start thinking about her parents as people, instead of just as her parents—and about the way things were with them, and about how this influenced pretty much everything she did. Psychology;Jameswasnotatcollege,becauseJames,as he had told Catherine that first day in Baggot Street, had not wanted to go to college, had wanted to do something different, had wanted to go his own way, but if James had gone to college, he told her, it was psychology he would have liked to study. That or theology, he had added, and Catherine had burst out laughing, assuming the theology part to be another of his jokes, because he was hardly religious; but James had insisted he wanted to understand, he said, what it was, exactly, that people believed.

James hardly needed to go to college, anyway; James already seemed to know about everything. Art, obviously; Catherine was a year into a degree that was half art history and he knew ten times more than her. He seemed to know more about her other subject, English, too, though on poetry she thought she had the advantage. But when it came to people and the way they behaved, James could talk for hours, and when it came to other things, too; politics, for instance. One night a couple of weeks previously, Catherine had found herself lying awake for hours, thinking about the North—or rather, thinking about the question of whether, if you talk about the North on the phone—as she and James, or rather James, had for a long time, that night—your call was likely to be picked upon, to be noted, along with your name and your whereabouts. Because James had said that this often happened; at the end of the call, James had mentioned, as casually as though it were nothing at all, that he and Catherine were probably on some list now, the two of them, that phone calls all over the country were monitored for conversations just like theirs.

Excerpted from Tender by Darragh McKeon. Copyright © 2016 by Darragh McKeon. Excerpted by permission of Lee Boudreaux Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.