In 2006, his third novel, Be Near Me, was published by Faber and Faber and long-listed for that year's Booker Prize. It went on to win the Los Angeles Times's 2007 Prize for Fiction. [7] In 2008, he edited a new selection of Robert Burns's poems for Canongate Books, published as A Night Out with Robert Burns. A copy was lodged in every secondary school in Scotland. Following on from this, he wrote and presented a three-part film on Burns for the BBC, The World According to Robert Burns, first on 5 January 2009. In January 2011, Scotland on Sunday gave away 80,000 copies of the book. Also in 2008, Faber & Faber published O'Hagan's first non-fiction collection, The Atlantic Ocean: Essays on Britain and America, which was shortlisted for the 2008 Saltire Book of the Year Award. [8]

Racing against reality" The New York Review of Books 54/11 (28 June 2007): 4–8 [review of Don DeLillo, Falling Man] Mayflies is both a coming-of-age story and a meditation on life-long male friendship, assisted dying and what it means to take control and live the lives we truly want to. It is nostalgic, poignant and moving and honestly depicts the bonds and boundaries of a shared life and values. We first meet Tully in 1986 in a Working Men’s Club where he’s with all his pals and singing in his band ‘The Sherbet Fountains’. When I first read Andrea’s scripts I was very excited to be part of this story. The characters felt very relatable to me as it begins in the 80s, a time when I was a teenager growing up in Scotland. I feel Andrea has captured Andrew O’Hagan’s novel beautifully, the poetic raucous rebel nature of these young men growing up and then as times passes the powerful and moving outcome of their great friendship. The moves seem monumental, but they are radically incomplete. Two truisms stare at each other like twins: you can’t go home again but you can’t entirely leave home, either. The narrator of O’Hagan’s first novel, Our Fathers, hopes to move to his own metaphorical New Town, ‘the world of all possible lights’, but he also writes: ‘The child you have been will never desert you.’ To which both that novel and the new one seem to wish to add: and the parents we have had will never let us go. Or will they?In August 2017, O'Hagan gave a speech at The Edinburgh International Book Festival, where he declared that he had become a supporter of Scottish independence. [25] Tully is the heroic front-man of the young boys; Jimmy is his best friend, already a budding writer in 1986. Jimmy is shy and unsure of how to find his place in the world and Tully provides a shining, working-class example: everybody loves him, he’s true to himself, he’s really good at life, but as the story unfolds the boys and their wives – the powerful Anna and the sensitive Iona – are put to the test when terminal illness suddenly enters the picture.

Personality in this sense is what performers are always said to have, and it’s what Hughie Green says Maria has. But in another sense a personality is just what she hasn’t got. At one point she looks at herself in a mirror and decides that her body is ‘apart from her’. ‘The person with thoughts was different from the person with arms and legs, a stomach and a face.’ She is a person but she doesn’t know who she is. The epigraph to the novel reminds us that Judy Garland felt that the noise outside her, the sound of applause, protected her from ‘the noise inside’. With Maria it’s not exactly a question of noise, in fact it’s the reverse, as we shall see in a moment. But she does need the applause, real or imagined. She is a little girl who was always a performer, magnetic in the eyes of others, unformed in her own. ‘She didn’t dwell in rooms as other children did – rather, she placed herself in the middle of them as if every room was a stage, an echo-chamber built for projection and confidence.’ She vanishes into her shows, goes missing in celebrity. Here is a passage to set beside Lucia’s moment of confusion. Maria is in bed in London and has just spoken to her grandmother on the telephone: In all of these cases, O’Hagan goes out with police and meets with social workers and families, always looking for the deeper truths so often left forgotten. What kind of lives did those who have gone missing lead? What made them disappear? What happens to those left behind?There are different ways to be a misper (as police jargon for missing persons has it.) Some people have reasons for going missing - and want to remain so. Many folk O’Hagan met in an occasional shelter, for drop-ins, fell into that category. He also notes an increasing category of missing who are simply unnoticed until their bodies are found in their homes months or years after their deaths.