Rick O'Shea

You never think when you write a review of a book you like that the review might end up on the back cover one day.

It had been out for a while, but I can’t believe it’s only 6 months since I got my arse in gear and reviewed Louise’s first, award-winning book Only Ever Yours. Unlike her first gem, this is not set in the future; this is Ireland right now in which Emma, a teenage girl, is gang-raped while drunk at a party, remembers nothing of it and wakes up on the doorstep of her family house the next morning. She has pictures of what happened trawled across the internet and then has to deal with the unexpected fallout as the perpetrators are […]

It’s been a while back since I read an early proof of Tom Morris’s lovely new collection of short stories. I merely know him as the editor of Stinging Fly and the brilliant Dubliners 100 anthology and that guy I met on a judging panel I was at a Literary Death Match event who was softly spoken, charming and instantly funnier with his assessments of the readers than any of the rest of us. In this, his first collection of stories, he shows us the pulled back lace curtains of (mostly) Caerphilly with a young lad working his last shift […]

I’m not sure I could ever use the word “enjoy” to describe Young God. It’s remarkably akin to being hit sharply across the head with a box set of the first series of True Detective. Nikki is 13 when her mother falls from a cliff and she goes to find her absent father in his remote trailer and continue her family’s drug trade in the redneck Appalachians. She’s abused by her dead mother’s boyfriend, takes drugs copiously and participates in cutting up a body with an axe. Amongst other things. This one is hard to quantify for me. I came away […]

  There are few things more disappointing as a reader than to have a much anticipated second novel fall short of your high hopes. And here we are. Armada is the second novel from professional fanboy and screenwriter Ernie Cline and tells the story of Zack Lightman – an obsessive gamer finishing high school who works part time in a video games store. His dad was killed at the age of 19 in an explosion in a sewage factory (seriously!). We open with Zack staring out the window in class and them witnessing a spaceship buzzing his school. Not just […]

To start with, Paul Murray gives us a good old-fashioned switcheroo for the two main characters in The Mark And The Void. Paul is a brash, crass, money-driven egotistic author years after his first success and failing miserably to come up with his new book. Claude is a principled, quiet, philosophy loving French banker working with the “Bank Of Torabundo” in the IFSC in the months just before the crash in a very thinly fictionalised Ireland of 2008. Paul turns up one day and suggests to Claude that he’d love to write an everyman story of the banking world “like […]