Be Near Me Author:Andrew O'Hagan "Always trust a stranger," said David?s mother when he returned from Rome. "It?s the people you know who let you down." — Half a life later, David is Father Anderton, a Catholic priest with a small parish in Scotland. He befriends two local teenagers who live in a world he barely understands. Their company stirs memories of earlier happiness?his ... more »days at a Catholic school in Yorkshire, the student revolt in 1960s Oxford, and a choice he once made in the orange groves of Rome. But their friendship also ignites the suspicions and smoldering hatred of a town that resents strangers, and brings Father David to a reckoning with the gathered tensions of past and present.