Rick O'Shea

Almost 2 years ago in Smock Alley Theatre I was asked, along with the far more qualified Tom Morris and Tara Flynn, to judge a literary death match as part of the Bram Stoker Festival. 3 contestants, 3 performances, 1 enthralled audience. It was a great night. The winner on the night was a passionate guy with a brilliant story told with tons of style and plenty of delivery. I knew at the time that if we published a novel I’d be one of the first in the queue to buy it. Turns out, in a chat with him after, that […]

It was nice to start 2016 (or, to be honest the last few days of 2015 while I was on holliers) with something that came to me in semi-mysterious circumstances, full of handwritten notes, post-its and printed e-mails… Jack Sparks was a controversial journo-turned social media personality and author who had written books such as “Jack Sparks on a Pogo Stick” (where he travelled the length of the UK on said transport), “Jack Sparks on Gangs” (you get the idea) and “Jack Sparks on Drugs” (where, and detrimentally to his health he tried every drug known to man and ended up […]

There are ways to start a novel and ways to start a novel… And thus begins one of the best books I’ve read in a long time. Marie-Laure is the blind daughter of the widowed locksmith of the Paris Museum of Natural History at the outbreak of war. Werner and his sister live in an orphanage in a (no pun intended) dirt poor coal-mining town in Germany. This is the story of how their two extraordinary paths eventually intertwine many years later in the French coastal fortress town of Saint-Malo and the story of every other citizen of Europe engulfed in […]

Beautiful. Beatlebone is the most fantastic work of whatiffery – John Lennon comes to Ireland in 1978 to try to escape from crushing fame, the expectation of the world and, conversely, the domesticity of New York fatherhood by trying to get to an island he bought and let lapse into abandonment off the west coast in the late 60s. His foil, driver, spirit guide, aide-de-camp and the one tasked with both getting him there and hiding him from the pursuing press is local man Cornelius O’Grady. I’m no expert, but his Lennon sounds pitch perfect on my page (I felt like reading […]

Peter is a pastor preparing to be separated from his wife Bea because he’s off to preach the gospel in a new world on a dangerous journey and he may never be coming back. However, this isn’t the 1700s, this is the future and the potential converts are non-human aliens on another planet and this isn’t a NASA project or even a governmental one but an entirely privately run operation. Don’t be put off by it being an SF story as, like all truly great SF stories, it’s just hiding a far more contemporary (even historical!) narrative below. The tech is […]

This one has jumped the queue ahead of a few other books that I’ve read recently as it demands to be reviewed immediately and you have to read it. Now. I started Sapiens with the misconception that it was a book about the history of Homo sapiens and how we came about. It is, at least the start is, but quickly Harari lays waste to preconceptions I’ve had all my adult life. Written very much with mainstream audiences and non-scientists in mind he tells of the real history of a small ape-descended life form that exists at the same time as […]