“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

Saturday, October 3, 2015

Launch: John Connolly and Brian McGilloway at No Alibis

Ten years on from NOCTURNES, John Connolly publishes a second collection of short stories with NIGHT MUSIC: NOCTURNES VOLUME 2 (Hodder & Stoughton). It looks to be an absolute treat: 13 stories in total, including the Edgar-winning tale ‘The Caxton Private Lending Library & Book Depository’, ‘Holmes on the Range’, a further story derived from the Caxton Private Lending Library universe, and ‘The Hollow King’, which is rooted in the world of THE BOOK OF LOST THINGS. NIGHT MUSIC will be available in hardback and ebook from October 15th …
  Meanwhile, Brian McGilloway has just published the third in his Lucy Black series, PRESERVE THE DEAD (Corsair), with the blurb elves wittering thusly:
Detective Sergeant Lucy Black is visiting her father, a patient in a secure unit in Gransha Hospital on the banks of the River Foyle. He’s been hurt badly in an altercation with another patient, and Lucy is shocked to discover him chained to the bed for safety. But she barely has time to take it all in, before an orderly raises the alarm - a body has been spotted floating in the river below...
  The body of an elderly man in a grey suit is hauled ashore: he is cold dead. He has been dead for several days. In fact a closer examination reveals that he has already been embalmed. A full scale investigation is launched - could this really be the suicide they at first assumed, or is this some kind of sick joke?
  Troubled and exhausted, Lucy goes back to her father’s shell of a house to get some sleep; but there’ll be no rest for her tonight. She’s barely in the front door when a neighbour knocks, in total distress - his wife’s sister has turned up badly beaten. Can she help?
  In PRESERVE THE DEAD, Brian McGilloway weaves a pacy, intricate plot, full of tension to the very last page.
  Writing in last weekend’s Irish Times, Declan Hughes was very impressed indeed with PRESERVE THE DEAD. For the full review, clickety-click here
  John and Brian co-launch their books at No Alibis in Belfast later this month, with the details as follows:
No Alibis is pleased (very, very pleased!) to invite you to our store on Thursday 22nd October at 7pm for the Double Launch Party of John Connolly and Brian McGilloway’s latest works, NIGHT MUSIC: NOCTURNES VOLUME 2 and PRESERVE THE DEAD.
  We will also be celebrating the launch of our 4th limited edition publication. We are running a limited printing of NIGHT MUSIC: NOCTURNES VOLUME 2 by John Connolly. This edition is limited to 125 specially bound and slipcased copies, including exclusive artwork commissioned by Anne M. Anderson.
  This incredibly special event will be sponsored by Boundary Brewing Company. An event not be missed, folks!

Thursday, October 1, 2015

Review: TWO YEARS, EIGHT MONTHS AND TWENTY-EIGHT NIGHTS by Salman Rushdie

Salman Rushdie’s 10th novel opens in Arab Spain in 1195, when disgraced court physician and philosopher Ibn Rushd takes in the mysterious 16-year-old orphan Dunia. Given that the novel’s title adds up to 1,001 nights (aka ‘the number of magic’), it comes as no surprise when Dunia is revealed as the Lightning Princess, a jinnia – or genie – from the Upper World, or Fairyland.
  The many children of the union between this vain but brilliant man and the beautiful, magical princess multiply and spread out all over the world. A thousand years later, as the world faces an ecological disaster that morphs into an existential crisis when the wicked djinn of the Upper World declare war on humanity, Dunia’s children – the Duniazat – rise to the apparently impossible challenge of defeating their immortal foes.
  That’s the plot in a nutshell, but a summary does little justice to the digressive, delightfully fantastical tale of Two Years, Eight Months & Twenty-Eight Nights. Rushdie draws heavily on the Arabian Nights for his narrative here, but Scheherazade’s stories are only one source of inspiration. The novel blends history, philosophy, myth and legend as Rushdie playfully recounts the cataclysmic events that ushered the novel’s narrators – an anonymous, collective ‘we’ – into humanity’s Golden Age of peace, wisdom and prosperity, 800 hundred years hence.
  Rushdie, the author of The Satanic Verses (1988) and Midnight’s Children (1981), the latter the winner of ‘the Best of the Booker Prize’ in 2008, here revels in silliness and whimsy – indeed, there are times when the shades of Kurt Vonnegut and Douglas Adams battle for dominance with Italo Calvino and Georges Sirtzes. Ibn Rushd may well be a high-minded disciple of Aristotle, and spends eternity locked in a philosophical feud with his bitter rival, the fear-mongering Ghazali, but the novel is peppered with pop culture references that range from Batman to Laurel and Hardy, Harry Potter to Isaac Asmiov.
  It’s also a novel deeply immersed in books and reading as an intrinsically human endeavour. The jinnia, we are told rarely have children – “That would be as if a story mated with its reader to produce another reader.” – but Dunia “produced offspring the way Georges Simenon wrote novels.” Humanity, and particularly the evolved ‘we’ telling us the story, “are the creature that tells itself stories to understand what sort of creature it is.”
  Rushdie, of course, had a fatwa issued against him in 1989 on the basis that The Satanic Verses was perceived as blasphemous, and while Two Years, Eight Months & Twenty-Eight Nights is on the one hand an exhilarating exercise in the joy of storytelling akin to Rushdie’s own The Enchantress of Florence (2008), it is also a subversive piece of religious satire. The evil djinn – the Ifriti – seduce and subjugate human men to do their wicked bidding in the war against humanity, preying on their weaknesses and base instincts – sex, mainly – and sending them out to kill and die under a black flag. “When lonely, hopeless young men were provided with loving, or at least desirous, at the very least willing sexual partners,” writes Rushdie, “they lost interest in suicide belts, bombs and the virgins of heaven, and preferred to live.”
  Ultimately, this funny, profound and gorgeously readable novel thrives on unresolved tensions between reality and magic, fact and fiction, philosophy and religion. “They’re all make-believe,” the storyteller Blue Yasmeen tells us, “the realist fantasies and the fantastic fantasies are both made up.” It’s our tragedy, she declares, that “our fictions are killing us, but if we didn’t have those fictions, maybe that would kill us too.” ~ Declan Burke

  This review was first published in the Irish Examiner.