Novelist Mike McCormack on Notes From a Coma and his Irish Roots

This interview was recorded at Politics & Prose bookstore in Washington, D.C. on Sunday, March 17, 2013. In Notes from a Coma, JJ O’ Malley, adopted from a Romanian orphanage by a single father in the west of Ireland, grows up a permanent outsider, and yet he finds his place in the community. At least until his world is shaken by the death of his best friend, and he volunteers for the “Somnos Project,“ an experimental program testing deep coma as a potential option in the EU penal system. In a prison s