Graham Norton Comes Around - The New York Times

The Irish entertainer is known for his freewheeling talk show, but in his novel “Home Stretch” he explores what it’s like for a gay man to return to his home and find both it and himself 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.

And it’s about what it’s like to return much later, when both you and the place have been wholly transformed.

(He wouldn’t discuss his domestic arrangements except to suggest, cheerfully, that he has an active social life. “I’m not lonely, let’s put it that way,” he said.).

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.

“I dressed like a boy for you,” she said.

“He’s very intuitive about his audience, and he has a great deal of empathy with his guests,” said Graham Stuart, who has been working with Norton since his early TV days and is the managing director of So Television, their production company.

“I think at the heart of everything that Graham’s done — and I include the wildness of our early shows — it’s about intelligence, emotional intelligence and personal intelligence,” Stuart said.

In the acknowledgments in “Home Stretch,” Norton thanks “all the people who stayed in Ireland to fight for the modern, tolerant country it has become.”.

His own reconciliation with Ireland, Norton said, came about in part because of how his family’s neighbors stepped in to help when his father died

“If I had been writing books in my 20s, they would have been glib, cynical, harsh and funny in a kind of smart-arsey way,” Norton said