Rick O'Shea

Book Forty Nine 2014:  The Bees by Laline Paull Now here we have it. Something unique. The real deal. As with so many other things I come across and want to press into your hot, virtual hands immediately, I don’t want to reveal more of The Bees than I have to. Suffice to say that it is set entirely within a beehive and that, with the exception of a short prologue and epilogue, all of the characters are bees. You heard me. Imagine a book about a place that is part repressive North Korean regime, part filled with religious nuts, part Shakespearian foolery, part […]

Book Forty Eight 2014:  No Place To Hide by Glenn Greenwald I’m going to keep this one simple. It’s the story of former defence contractor Edward Snowden, his making contact with Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald and the boggling string of revelations that followed about the NSA’s PRISM program and just how far the tendrils of the American government security apparatus reaches into all of our e-mails, chats, calls and activity online. The first 2/3 of the book or so are the story (told with utter realism but reading like a thriller), the last part a piece on the overall implications of what […]

Book Forty Seven 2014:  On Such A Full Sea by Chang-Rae Lee This book has been *incredibly* frustrating. It came recommended, looked intriguing, even made it onto the Guardian’s list of the best books of the first half of this year, yet I feel like I’ve wasted my time in reading it. It’s set in a post-apocalyptic (sort of) U.S. where the Charters live in the swanky settlements, the workers live in places like B-Mor (where Fan, the main character, comes from) and then there’s the wild, lawless rest of the country. The language is ethereal and almost pointlessly philosophical in places, […]

Book Forty Six 2014:  Look Who’s Back by Timur Vermes Best. Book. Cover. Design. Of. 2014. The pitch is simple – Adolf Hitler wakes up on a piece of waste ground in Berlin in 2011 and has to adjust to the modern Germany and the world. People, obviously, mistake him for an impersonator and take his continuation of business as usual as satire. He becomes a TV star… What could have either fallen very flat or just been plain tasteless is instead really quite funny in places allowing the author to look at the follies and foibles of the 21st century (politicians, reality TV, […]

Book Forty Five 2014:  We Have Always Lived In The Castle by Shirley Jackson This is just delicious. Straight up it reminds me on so many levels of Iain Banks The Wasp Factory that his incredible book must have been influenced by Shirley Jackson’s much earlier work. A troubled teenager living in relative isolation in a large, creepy house with strange “parental” figures near a small town, the belief in the protective power of burying and hanging up items around the house, the slow reveal of a dark, terrible moment in the past. For me too, there were elements of Night Of The Hunter to […]

Book Forty Four 2014:  Levels Of Life by Julian Barnes Do not bring this book on holiday with you as a light read. Both my wife and myself ended up crying after we’d finished. She read it first, not knowing anything about the subject matter but having read a couple of his novels earlier in the year and liked them very much. I don’t think you should go into the experience so cold, so here goes. On the surface of it, this seems to be and entertaining history of small parts of the history of ballooning. Seriously. It’s only when […]