Hey Man

By Andrew Meehan

“If all that follows reads like a love story, that’s what it was…”

Hey Man is the story of Ian and Tommy, whose rich and tender friendship stretches across three fateful decades.

Their story begins in 1989, when seventeen-year-old Dubliner Ian finds himself lodging with thirty-year-old actor Tommy in London. A summer of long nights and early mornings leaves an indelible mark on them both. Then, the adventure ends. Tommy vanishes, and Ian is left with the ache of something unfinished.

When they meet again in Dublin, fifteen years later, Ian is Brother Eugene, a Benedictine monk searching for meaning in devotion, while Tommy is navigating fame, divorce, and his familiar restlessness. The old spark is there―but so are the questions: what did they mean to each other, and why does it still matter?

At Tommy’s sixtieth birthday, with illness casting its shadow, the truths long buried rise to the surface. Tender and devastating, Hey Man is a meditation on the mysteries of male friendship and the bonds that shape a life.

An ode to male friendship―wise, wry, poetic, and deeply moving.

Reviews of Hey Man

‘Life-affirming, peculiar, and deeply moving, Hey Man got under my skin and quietly burrowed its way toward my heart and, possibly, my soul’ – Aingeala Flannery

‘A wonderful, moving and deeply soulful book about friendship, forgiveness, grief, love, and all the things we wish we’d said when we didn’t say anything at all, or instead said something else entirely. At times it had me crying and laughing simultaneously. The best book I’ve read in a long time’ – Gary Lightbody, Snow Patrol