Rick O'Shea

I couldn’t have been more pleased than with this little gem I plucked off the shelf of Easons in Cork a few months back. It’s Gibson’s non-fiction essays dealing with everything from communications to the future of the then-infant internet, collecting vintage watches on eBay to his love of Japan to Steely Dan to “Disneyland With The Death Penalty” (his view of visiting Singapore in 1993). Imagine someone who writes stuff like this fairly unwillingly (because he claims himself that he’s no good at it) and yet frequently in the course of these “untalented” meanderings opens the hood on the […]

You might remember me saying a lot of nice things last year about Sarah Lotz’s first book  The Three and Day Four, while strictly not a sequel, is set in the same world… sort of. Unlike the last one though this is written through the eyes and experiences of a group of characters aboard a singles cruise in the Gulf Of Mexico on an ageing ship belonging to a cruise line with a questionable history. She brings us a cast including a dodgy medium milking her followers, her personal assistant at the end of her tether, a blogger trying to […]

One of those that didn’t win this year’s IMPAC it’s a small story of normal people involved in something huge. Fuad, Yachine, Ali and Nabil all come from Sidi Moumen, one of the poorest slums in Casablanca. Their football team is part what marks them out from everyone else in the other slums and part gang, of sorts, for banding together and fighting other young lads. Yachine narrates all from the afterlife as you realise fairly quickly that these impossibly poor kids slowly find themselves becoming a team of suicide bombers in the run up to the real life Casablanca […]

Did this last year and people seemed to be interested so, just in case you’re heading off on holliers over the next while here are a few books you might want to consider bringing with you for the ride. All ones I’ve read in the last 6 months or so, all hugely worth your time. Click on the quotes for my full reviews. The Life And Loves Of A He Devil by Graham Norton “…an easy, very funny and genuinely laugh out loud in places read with more than its fair share of honesty about his personal life…” I Am […]

I have to be honest and tell you that this had been sitting on the “to be read” shelf for ages and thankfully forced its way to the front in the research I did for interviewing Graham recently at Listowel Writers Week. I’ll keep this simple for you. Like Graham Norton on d’telly? Great. Like to read a book divided up into unconventional sections of his life without, as he said to me himself at the interview, “all the dull bits about your childhood that no-one cares about?” Bingo. Fancy an easy, very funny and genuinely laugh out loud in […]

This one not strictly mine but nicked from my wife after she finished it recently and glad I did. It’s a memoir of sorts from legendary journalist and interviewer Lynn Barber (she wrote An Education, adapted into the Carey Mulligan film a few years ago) and trails and trawls meanderingly through her history as a professional interrogator of the famous and powerful while setting out her stall on life, work and how to do them both. It’s a long-hackneyed phrase but she really does seem to take no prisoners in either. Staring, of all places, in her early days writing […]