“Declan Burke is his own genre. The Lammisters dazzles, beguiles and transcends. Virtuoso from start to finish.” – Eoin McNamee “This bourbon-smooth riot of jazz-age excess, high satire and Wodehouse flamboyance is a pitch-perfect bullseye of comic brilliance.” – Irish Independent Books of the Year 2019 “This rapid-fire novel deserves a place on any bookshelf that grants asylum to PG Wodehouse, Flann O’Brien or Kyril Bonfiglioli.” – Eoin Colfer, Guardian Best Books of the Year 2019 “The funniest book of the year.” – Sunday Independent “Declan Burke is one funny bastard. The Lammisters ... conducts a forensic analysis on the anatomy of a story.” – Liz Nugent “Burke’s exuberant prose takes centre stage … He plays with language like a jazz soloist stretching the boundaries of musical theory.” – Totally Dublin “A mega-meta smorgasbord of inventive language ... linguistic verve not just on every page but every line.Irish Times “Above all, The Lammisters gives the impression of a writer enjoying himself. And so, dear reader, should you.” – Sunday Times “A triumph of absurdity, which burlesques the literary canon from Shakespeare, Pope and Austen to Flann O’Brien … The Lammisters is very clever indeed.” – The Guardian

Sunday, February 27, 2011

Once More, From The Top Loader

Ed O’Loughlin came storming out of the gates a couple of years back with NOT UNTRUE & NOT UNKIND, which garnered a 2009 Booker Prize longlist nomination, not bad going at all for a debut novel. His forthcoming tome, TOP LOADER, sounds a right rip-snorter, and is described in the jacket copy as ‘A darkly comic masterpiece in the tradition of M*A*S*H, CATCH-22 and SLAUGHTERHOUSE 5’. Crikey. Quoth the blurb elves:
Spying inside the Embargoed Zone is an expensive business, not to say risky, and Agent Cobra wants his wages in full. But his down-at-heel spymaster can only offer payment in kind - and the first thing he finds in an unattended storeroom. And so both men are sucked into the mysterious Toploader project, a race to retrieve a deadly secret from inside the world’s first - and best - walled-off terrorist entity. Also caught in the crossfire are a resourceful teenage girl, a gung-ho reporter, a hapless drone-pilot and at least one very unfortunate donkey. Toploader is about to make their lives a lot more dangerous, and an awful lot more bizarre …
  NOT UNTRUE & NOT UNKIND was given something of an edge given that former journalist O’Loughlin reported from Africa for the Irish Times for some years. He also worked as the Middle East correspondent for Melbourne’s The Age, which suggests that that yon ‘Embargoed Zone’, aka ‘the world’s first - and best - walled-off terrorist entity’, may or may not be based on the Gaza Strip.
  Either way, if NOT UNTRUE is any guide, O’Loughlin can write the hell out of a book, and ‘a darkly comic’ tale set in the Middle East sounds like a hell of a prospect. I’ll keep you posted as to how it goes …

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