The latest crime fiction column in the Irish Times was published last weekend, featuring offerings from George Pelecanos, Laura Wilson, DA Mishani and Margie Orford. It also included UNRAVELLING OLIVER, the debut novel from Irish author Liz Nugent. To wit:
Liz Nugent’s Unravelling Oliver (Penguin Ireland, €14.99) opens with Dublin-based writer Oliver Ryan viciously beating his wife Alice. The assault is described in the first person by Oliver himself, but Oliver’s is only one of a number of first-person accounts on offer here, each one a piece of the jigsaw that gradually assembles itself into portrait of a pathetic young boy who grew up to become a monster who writes best-selling children’s books. The reader is given no framing device relating to who might have collated the various accounts, or why, but the narrative gambit pays off handsomely. Oliver Ryan may be a vain, shallow and ultimately violent sociopath, but his story grows more compelling and nuanced the more we learn about him and the factors that influenced the man he would become, some of which were set in train even before he was born. More an investigation into psychology than a conventional crime thriller, Unravelling Oliver is a formidable debut. ~ Declan Burke
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