Like Connor, he grew up gay in a small town - in his case, Bandon, in County Cork - and like Connor, he slipped away when he was young, flying to America with £200 (about $275 in modern exchange rates) and a vague plan to move to Los Angeles. Norton was born Graham Walker, taking “Norton” as a stage name later. When he returns years later, the book’s threads begin to weave together, into a story of change and growth. He moves to England and eventually to New York, becoming part of the great Irish diaspora. The main character in “Home Stretch,” Connor Hayes, bears a double burden: responsibility for a horrific car accident that killed three people, and his status as a gay man in an era when homosexuality in Ireland was both a sin and a crime. “Home Stretch” is out in the United States on Tuesday. Though he also owns several properties in England and New York (“I’m chronically overhoused,” he said), he has spent many months in this house, not far from where his mother and sister live, during the pandemic. Oddly enough, or perhaps not oddly at all, he was speaking from the house on the country’s south coast that he bought some 15 years ago. “Irish books are so often about leaving, or about going back, or about staying,” Norton, 58, said. And it’s about what it’s like to return much later, when both you and the place have been wholly transformed. The book, which HarperVia is releasing in the United States on Tuesday, is about how the tendrils of pain from a single incident can extend far into the future, but it’s also about fleeing your home because you don’t feel you belong there, as Norton did when he left Ireland in the early 1980s. His latest, “Home Stretch,” which begins in a close-knit Irish community in 1987, is his most personal yet.
Talk-show host, radio presenter, Eurovision Song Contest frontman, “RuPaul’s Drag Race UK” judge, he is known for being quick, empathetic and outrageous, and for relishing nothing more than a good dirty anecdote.īut Norton is also the author of three novels, and it is a surprise to discover how quiet and restrained they are, how far removed from his outré public persona. Graham Norton has been a saucy mainstay of British entertainment for so long that it is hard to imagine him doing anything else.
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