Yesterday’s Dirt

With his debut novel, Yesterday’s Dirt, local author Stuart Steen McFaull delivers a heart-wrenching, emotionally powerful tale of suicide, grief, and the love between Mother and son.

The story is set on the Isle of Man, and is a work of fiction shaped by real-life experiences.

McFaull – a local copywriter with Manx media agency DotPerformance – lost his own Mother who took her own life in 2016, and was inspired to write a novel which dealt with the intensity of that very specific kind of grief.

Yesterday’s Dirt follows protagonist Dylan Blakeney in the months following the traumatic suicide of his mother, Jane . We join Dylan on a downward spiral of self-destruction as his life falls apart.

The novel covers a vast range of issues such as mental health, the complexities of grief, drug addiction, sexual abuse, businesses piggy-backing on social causes, along with the restorative powers of hope and love.

A book of lacerating darkness, guural pain and resolute melancholy, Yesterday’s Dirt also finds pitch-black comedy amidst the tumultuous strife, and takes in much of the natural beauty of our island – featuring Port Grenagh Beach, Mooragh Park and the Ayres National Nature Reserve.

Yesterday’s Dirt is available now via Amazon in ebook or print versions, and is also stocked in Ramsey Bridge Bookshop.

SYNOPSIS

After his Mother’s suicide, Dylan Blakeney is spiralling. Paralysed by grief and accompanied by a band of troubled misfits, Dylan embarks on a hedonistic quest for oblivion that will leave him on the brink.

Set in the sleepy, beautiful, yet haunting isolation of the Isle of Man, ‘Yesterday’s Dirt’ is an unflinching, darkly comic look at the pain that suicide leaves behind, asking the question ‘is love enough to save us?’

A story of mother and son. Love and death.
Fear and loathing.