His most ambitious work to date, Poguemahone, is “a wild, 600-page ballad, narrated in a kind of free verse monologue" and what better publisher to embark on this adventure with him than Unbound.

A publisher who has reignited the 19th-century subscription model for books, it has high ambitions for the novel, with advance reading copies, marketing campaigns, performances and other publicity events planned for publication. As Unbound's publisher John Mitchinson says: “Poguemahone is a book for the ages, an epic of the Irish in England, steeped in music and folklore, crammed with scores of characters, on a scale Pat has never attempted before. Imagine the supernatural terror of Beyond Black by Hilary Mantel, combined with the experimental élan of Lanny by Max Porter and the mesmeric ventriloquism of Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellman and you’ll get some idea of what McCabe has achieved.’

Marianne has worked closely with McCabe since the beginning of his prize-winning career, and was blown away by Mitchinson's enthusiasm and vision: 'we are loving this joyful and creative collaborative adventure,' she says, and McCabe himself adds, 'To say that I'm glad I wrote it is putting it mildly — but I'm even gladder that someone as intuitive and experienced as John Mitchinson and Unbound have agreed to publish it...to paraphrase Dan Fogarty, the narrator of Poguemahone "at the end of the rainbow, there waited Unbound."'