Rick O'Shea

As has been the fashion here for a while, I’ve put together a list of books that might be good either to buy for yourself or for those you lose this Xmas. The new bit is that instead of just leaving you with the original reviews (you can still find them by clicking on the book title) there are also short 3 or 4 line excerpts too. You’re time poor, I get it. 🙂 They are all books that I’ve read this year, not necessarily books published this year and come in the order in which I read them. Any others […]

(This is one of a series of shortened reviews as I have so many to catch up on!) Celeste Ng’s novel of a Chinese-American girl whose body turns up in a lake near her house in the late 1970s has all the stock elements you’d usually find in such a story – the corpse, a lake, cops, suspects (including a bad boy) but that’s not what this book is about. This is a beautifully crafted story of those left behind, primarily Lydia’s father James and her mother Marilyn, their relationship before Lydia’s death, and particularly after. It’s about Lydia too, but more […]

Don’t pay any attention to this review, in fact don’t even arse yourself reading it. Donal Ryan’s new collection of short stories is simply a book that you should have known was something you needed to devour. After the quality of his wonderful The Thing About December and The Spinning Heart it more than lives up to both. As I say so often here in reviews I want to reveal little about the stories themselves but I will tell you that the incredible universes here stretch from kids playing hurling in Syria to arguments over car parts through tiny kitchen conversations with ould […]

Would you believe this is one that’s been sitting on my bookshelf for the bones of ten years unloved and unread until, like Sunday night homework, I read it in the last 2 weeks before I actually travelled to Japan for the first time. You need to bear a couple of things in mind – it’s originally written in 1998 when the author was working as a teacher in Japan and very, very personal thus don’t come expecting a travel guide. It’s an incredibly personal account of his hike from the very south to the very north hitching pretty much […]

I feel genuinely ashamed that I haven’t reviewed this up until now (sorry Sarah, read it months ago and there’s been a backlog!) As a result of which I’ll keep this brief and clear. One tells the story of 16-year-old conjoined twins, mostly in blank verse (sometimes sections are huge chunks, sometimes less than a single page) and from the point of view of one of them; Grace. They can’t be homeschooled anymore and thus have to venture out into the real, sometimes cruel world of school, cameraphones, teenagers and boys. Yes, officially, I see this being listed as “children’s fiction” […]

Fascinating. Bloody fascinating. One of my major problems when it comes to reading non-fiction (we all have it) is that I tend to read the views and opinions of people who I know will pretty much agree with my world-view. Yes, I have to admit that if the ideas coming out of Mick Hume’s Trigger Warning weren’t coming from a lifelong left-wing journalist and campaigner (i.e. if it was coming from a U.S. Republican nutjob) I would probably use the old confirmation bias and dismiss most of it as horseshit. However. This is a fascinating and, more importantly, challenging walk […]