Friday, June 5, 2015
Taking A Break …
Thursday, June 4, 2015
Publications: Irish Crime Fiction 2015
GUN STREET GIRL by Adrian McKinty (January 8)
MARKED OFF by Don Cameron (February 9)
TAKEN FOR DEAD by Graham Masterton (February 12)
WHITE CHURCH, BLACK MOUNTAIN by Thomas Paul Burgess (March)
THE DEFENCE by Steve Cavanagh (March 12)
THE LAKE by Sheena Lambert (March 19)
A SONG OF SHADOWS by John Connolly (April 9)
KILLING WAYS by Alex Barclay (April 9)
THE ORGANISED CRIMINAL by Jarlath Gregory (April 9)
I AM IN BLOOD by Joe Murphy (April 30)
A MAD AND WONDERFUL THING by Mark Mulholland (May 8)
THE BONES OF IT by Kelly Creighton (May 15)
THE NIGHT GAME by Frank Golden (May 28)
EVEN THE DEAD by Benjamin Black (May 28)
BLOOD SISTERS by Graham Masterton (June 1)
ONLY WE KNOW by Karen Perry (June 4)
AFTER THE FIRE by Jane Casey (June 18)
ALOYSIUS TEMPO by Jason Johnson (June 25)
THOSE WE LEFT BEHIND by Stuart Neville (June 26)
ARE YOU WATCHING ME? by Sinead Crowley (July 2nd)
GREEN HELL by Ken Bruen (July 7)
BARLOW BY THE BOOK by John McAllister (July 26)
FREEDOM’S CHILD by Jax Miller (July 30)
HIDE AND SEEK by Jane Casey (July 30)
PRESERVE THE DEAD by Brian McGilloway (August 6)
WITH OUR BLESSING by Jo Spain (September 3)
THE GAME CHANGER by Louise Phillips (September 3)
DEATH AT WHITEWATER CHURCH by Andrea Carter (September 3)
A DEADLY GAMBLE by Pat Mullan (September TBC)
DEAD SECRET by Ava McCarthy (November 19)
THE SILENT DEAD by Claire McGowan (November 19)
If you’re an Irish crime writer with a book on the way, please feel free to drop me a line (including details on dates, publisher, etc.) if you’d like to be included in the ongoing updates.
NB: Publication dates are given according to Amazon UK, and are subject to change.
One to Watch: ALOYSIUS TEMPO by Jason Johnson
Aloysius Tempo creates ‘accidents’ that kill. He fled a notorious Irish care home and has built a life as an unarmed hitman, travelling Europe and ending lives for cash. Now veteran government recruiter Imelda wants him back to slay four of the nation’s most hated people; a loan shark, a shamed priest, a wildly controversial female politician find themselves in his sights. But when he learns more about the fourth person on the list, everything changes for Aloysius Tempo.ALOYSIUS TEMPO will be published on June 25th.
Wednesday, June 3, 2015
Launch: THE BONES OF IT by Kelly Creighton
No Alibis Bookstore is pleased to invite you to the launch of Kelly Creighton’s debut novel, ‘The Bones of It’. This FREE event takes place in store on Thursday 4th June, 6:30pm.For all the details, clickety-click here …
‘A brilliant crime debut, chilling, compulsive and beautifully written. Fans of The Butcher Boy and The Book of Evidence will find much to love in The Bones of It. A hugely impressive addition to the growing body of Irish crime fiction. I look forward to reading much more from Kelly Creighton.’ – Brian McGilloway
Interview: Douglas Kennedy, author of THE HEAT OF BETRAYAL
What follows is a thrilling tale as Robin sets off alone in a strange land to find her husband. The opening, which moves from Casablanca to Essaouira, is reminiscent of Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much, but Douglas also had more literary inspirations to draw upon.For the rest of the interview, clickety-click here …
“There were two novels that were in my mind, or two writers I should say. The first was Paul Bowles, with The Sheltering Sky, which is an extraordinary book. But I was also thinking about Patricia Highsmith, and Highsmith was always very interesting on Americans abroad, especially a couple in trouble, with secrets. I also had in mind [VS] Naipaul, who in one of his books talked about a certain kind of Leftist from the West, who would always turn up in centres of revolution with return air-tickets,” he laughs.
Tuesday, June 2, 2015
One to Watch: HIDE AND SEEK by Jane Casey
‘If I hadn’t walked into the room at that moment, maybe everything would have worked out differently. Maybe everything would have been all right after all . . .’HIDE AND SEEK will be published on July 30th.
Port Sentinel may be a beautiful seaside tourist trap, but in the short time Jess Tennant has lived there, it has seen its fair share of tragedy. Tragedy that somehow Jess keeps getting caught up in.
A schoolgirl from the town goes missing, leaving her diary behind and a lot of unanswered questions. Has she run away from her unhappy home or is there something much more sinister going on? And can Jess find her before it’s too late?
Monday, June 1, 2015
Publication: BLOOD SISTERS by Graham Masterton
Katie Maguire hunts a serial killer targeting nuns in the gruesome new thriller from Graham Masterton.BLOOD SISTERS is published on Kindle on June 1st, with the hardcover edition due on October 8th.
In a nursing home on the outskirts of Cork, an elderly nun lies dead. She has been suffocated. It looks like a mercy-killing - until another sister from the same convent is found viciously murdered, floating in the Glashaboy river.
The nuns were good women, doing God’s work. Why would anyone want to kill them? But then a child’s skull is unearthed in the garden of the nuns’ convent, and DS Katie Maguire discovers a fifty year old secret that just might lead her to the killer ... if the killer doesn’t find her first.
Sunday, May 31, 2015
Retro: DANNY, THE CHAMPION OF THE WORLD by Roald Dahl
All of which was marvellous, because I vividly remember reading DANNY as a child myself, and it’s a book that has stuck in my memory for the best part of 40 years. That may well be, as I realised on re-reading it, that DANNY is essentially a ‘heist’ story, as Danny and his dad set about sabotaging local landowner Mr Victor Hazell’s shooting party by poaching his entire stock of pheasants, and with the tacit approval of the entire village – doctor, vicar and policeman included – to boot.
Like many crime writers, and certainly on this side of the pond, I read Enid Blyton voraciously during my childhood – the Famous Five, the Secret Seven, the Five Finder-Outers, the Adventure stories featuring Philip, Dinah, Lucy-Ann and Jack (and parrot Kiki), the Barney Mysteries, but also the Twins of St Clare’s and the Malory Towers books – but if memory serves, DANNY is the first book I read that was a mystery / crime story told from the perspective of the criminals. It’s also true that Danny and his dad aren’t poachers from need, driven to steal by hunger and want, but for the sheer thrill of it – the excitement of the deed itself, and the exhilaration of having pulled off the big one. And it’s not as if William is a Robin Hood character – William intends to share the proceeds of his heist with his friends, certainly, but given that said friends are a doctor, vicar and policeman, it’s not exactly a case of robbing the rich to give to the poor.
When I suggested to Lily that perhaps we shouldn’t be ‘up’ for Danny and his dad, because they were stealing from Mr Victor Hazell, she was having none of it. Mr Victor Hazell is a nasty piece of work, a snob and a bully, and he fully deserves his comeuppance, even if that involves Danny and his dad breaking the law.
It’s a similar kind of story to FANTASTIC MR FOX, of course, which we also enjoyed a couple of months ago, although in that case – from a moral perspective – Mr Fox steals in order to feed his family, and then reacts in spectacular fashion to the subsequent persecution. DANNY, THE CHAMPION OF THE WORLD is another matter entirely, a genteel story of sticking it to The Man for no other reason than The Man owns pheasants that taste good when they’re roasted.
No wonder Lily loved it so much. Next week we’ll probably move it up a notch to Richard Stark’s THE HUNTER.
Thursday, May 28, 2015
“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?” Sheena Lambert
What crime novel would you most like to have written?
Kevin Barry’s CITY OF BOHANE – although there is no way that book would ever have found its way inside my head.
What fictional character would you most like to have been?
Mrs Danvers …
Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
Penny Vincenzi. Like Jilly Cooper, but better. Give me champagne-drinking, horse (and other people’s husbands)-riding, upper-class, family saga escapism over James Joyce any day. Sorry, James.
Most satisfying writing moment?
Seeing my first full-length play, ‘Glanaphuca’, come to life onstage in rehearsed reading at The New Theatre in Dublin last year. It’s something a novelist never gets to see – but as a playwright, I observed my characters as real, living people for two hours on a cold day in December, and not only did I get to hear them speak, I got to witness the audience’s reaction to them. Amazing. Amazing.
If you could recommend one Irish crime novel, what would it be?
Liz Nugent’s UNRAVELLING OLIVER.
What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
THE LAKE, of course! And I cannot wait to see ‘City of Bohane – The Movie’ when it comes out (I think there is a screenplay in the works …). I’m picturing a ‘Sin City’-type production myself.
Worst / best thing about being a writer?
Best: Being able to work anytime, anywhere. Worst: Your siblings looking at you like you should probably be trying to get a real job.
The pitch for your next book is …?
Some family trees should never be climbed.
Who are you reading right now?
Just finished ALL THE THINGS I NEVER TOLD YOU by Celeste Ng.
God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
Write of course! I LOVE reading my own stuff!!
The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Original, readable and fabulous.
Sheena Lambert’s THE LAKE is published by Killer Reads.
One to Watch: WITH OUR BLESSING by Jo Spain
It’s true what they say ... revenge is sweet.WITH OUR BLESSING will be published on September 3rd.
1975. A baby, minutes old, is forcibly taken from its devastated mother.
2010. The body of an elderly woman - tortured to death - is found in a Dublin public park in the depths of winter.
Detective Inspector Tom Reynolds is working the case. He’s convinced the murder is linked to historical events that took place in the notorious Magdalene Laundries.
Reynolds and his team follow the trail to an isolated convent in the Irish countryside. But once inside, it becomes disturbingly clear that the killer is amongst them ... and is determined to exact further vengeance for the sins of the past.
News: Eoin McNamee’s BLUE IS THE NIGHT wins the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year
I interviewed Eoin on the publication of BLUE IS THE NIGHT, and he had this to say about the central mystery at the book’s heart:
“I always like to quote Francis Bacon,” says Eoin, “who said that the job of all art is to deepen the mystery. This book is about the mystery of Patricia Curran, and what really happened to her, and by extension the mystery she inherited from her family, her father and her mother.For the rest of the interview, clickety-click here …
“I started out originally, perhaps, to find out who killed Patricia Curran,” he continues, “but the book became about something other than that. It became more about ‘What is mystery?’ What is it that drives these stories, that drives people’s compulsion towards these stories?”
For more on the Kerry Group awards, clickety-click here …
Wednesday, May 27, 2015
News: Eoin McNamee’s BLUE IS THE NIGHT in the Irish Times Book Club
Blue is the Night by Eoin McNamee (Faber, £7.99) is the new Irish Times Book Club choice. The third and final novel of his acclaimed Blue Trilogy, following 2001’s Booker longlisted The Blue Tango and 2010’s Orchid Blue, it can also be read as a standalone work. It has been shortlisted for the €15,000 Kerry Irish Novel of the Year Award 2015 to be announced on Wednesday at Listowel Writers’ Week.For all the details on the Irish Times Book Club, and how you can win a signed copy of BLUE IS THE NIGHT, clickety-click here …
Set in Belfast in 1949, Lance Curran is set to prosecute a young man for a brutal murder, in the “Robert the Painter” case, one which threatens to tear society apart. In the searing July heat, corruption and justice vie as Harry Ferguson, Judge Curran’s fixer, contemplates the souls of men adrift, and his own fall from grace with the beautiful and wilful Patricia. Within three years, Curran will be a judge, his 19-year-old daughter dead, at the hands of a still unknown murderer, and his wife Doris condemned to an asylum for the rest of her days. In Blue Is the Night, it is Doris who finally emerges from the fog of deceit and blame to cast new light into the murder of her daughter – as McNamee once again explores and dramatises a notorious and nefarious case.
For a review of BLUE IS THE NIGHT, clickety-click here …
Tuesday, May 26, 2015
Interview: SJ Watson, author of SECOND LIFE
“As I was writing Second Life, I realised that I was writing about identity again, and this idea of ‘who are we, really? What is it that makes us what we are? How easily can we manipulate that’? With Second Life, it’s done in a much more knowing way, because, in some ways, Julia is manipulating her own identity, whereas, in Before I Go To Sleep, it’s Christine who is being manipulated by somebody else without her knowledge. It intrigues me, that I’m sitting here talking to you, but I’m a different person to who I am if I’m sitting at home with my partner, and I’m a different person again if I’m with my family. And all of those are different people to who I was when I worked in the health service. We all kind of carry this multiplicity of self within us.”For the rest of the interview, clickety-click here …
Monday, May 25, 2015
One to Watch: ARE YOU WATCHING ME? by Sinead Crowley
Dear Elizabeth,ARE YOU WATCHING ME? will be published on July 2nd. For all the details, clickety-click here …
I’ve been watching you.
I hope to see you ...
Soon.
Liz Cafferky is on the up. Rescued from her dark past by the owner of a drop-in centre for older men, Liz soon finds herself as the charity’s face - and the unwilling darling of the Dublin media.
Amidst her claustrophobic fame, Liz barely notices a letter from a new fan. But then one of the Centre’s clients is brutally murdered, and Elizabeth receives another, more sinister note.
Running from her own ghosts, Liz is too scared to go to the police. And with no leads, there is little Sergeant Claire Boyle can do to protect her.
Sunday, May 24, 2015
Review: BELFAST NOIR, edited by Adrian McKinty and Stuart Neville
In that sense it could be argued that Belfast Noir, the latest city-based collection of short stories from Akashic Books, arrives a couple of decades too late, now that Belfast is, thankfully, no longer “the most noir place on earth”, as Adrian McKinty, quoting Lee Child, claims in the introduction to this book.
That said, noir can also represent a broad church within crime fiction’s parameters, as the diversity of the stories in this collection suggests. It’s also true that Belfast Noir is timely, given that the last decade has seen the emergence of a generation of Northern Irish crime writers who are engaged with post-Troubles fiction, with authors such as McKinty and his coeditor, Stuart Neville, plus Claire McGowan, Brian McGilloway, Gerard Brennan, Sam Millar and Garbhan Downey, adding their voices to those who were publishing during the Troubles, such as Eoin McNamee, Eugene McEldowney and Colin Bateman.
If it’s disappointing but understandable that McKinty and Neville have opted not to contribute stories of their own to the collection, Colin Bateman’s absence is more surprising, not least because his Divorcing Jack, featuring his journalist turned private investigator, Dan Starkey, and published in the mid 1990s, is a seminal novel of Irish crime writing. Bateman’s blend of crime tropes and irreverent humour is present here, however, in a number of contributions.
Claire McGowan’s Rosie Grant’s Finger is an offbeat comic tale featuring an 18-year-old private eye who cycles around Belfast; Sam Millar’s Out of Time features the wisecracking private eye Karl Kane; Garbhan Downey’s hard-boiled but jocular tale Die Like a Rat is stitched through with cynical one-liners about the newspaper business.
For the most part the contributing authors play a straight bat. Brian McGilloway’s The Undertaking sets the tone with a tale about an undertaker who is presented with an offer he can’t refuse by former paramilitaries who now police the Belfast streets.
Arlene Hunt’s Pure Game is set in the grim world of dog-fighting, an allegory of sorts in which strutting hardmen send out ill-treated animals to kill on their behalf.
Gerard Brennan’s Ligature is a tale of petty crime, teenage rebellion and punitive reprisals, a heartbreaking story offering an intimate snapshot of crime and punishment in Belfast. Wet With Rain by Lee Child, the Jack Reacher author, who qualifies courtesy of a Belfast-born father, offers a take on the cold war involving Troubles-era paramilitaries.
One of the most interesting contributions is from Steve Cavanagh. The Grey is a courtroom drama that in its very form argues for the normalisation of fiction’s treatment of post-Troubles Belfast, although Cavanagh’s narrator, a lawyer, is fully aware of how the “comforting blanket” of Belfast’s new grey architecture reflects the moral climate.
The editors also take the bold step of commissioning a number of stories from authors who aren’t crime writers.
The science-fiction writer Ian McDonald contributes The Reservoir, a wedding-day story about dark secrets with a distinctly Gothic flavour. In Poison Lucy Caldwell reminds us that not all “crimes” break the law, even if they do have the power to destroy lives. Glenn Patterson’s Belfast Punk REP is one of the noirest of the stories, harking back to the halcyon days of Northern Ireland’s punk era and vividly illustrating the brutal dangers of not belonging to one or another of Belfast’s self-defining tribes. Highlights include Ruth Dudley Edwards’ Taking It Serious, an unsettling pen picture of a young man obsessed with the fading glories of the recent past, and one that serves as a rebuttal to McKinty’s optimistic assertion in the introduction that “only the most hardened individuals would feel a return to the grey desolation of the ’70s and ’80s is a sacrifice worth making”. Alex Barclay’s The Reveller is a darkly poetic tale of revenge and self-annihilating redemption that strikes a disturbingly ambiguous note as it concludes the collection.
Eoin McNamee’s Corpse Flowers is the most fully realised noir of all the contributions: a PSNI investigation into the murder of a young woman told at one remove via snapshots gleaned from a number of visual cues, including CCTV and home-movies, “the difficult-to-piece together recollections, the lyric fragments of the street traffic and retail security cams”.
Belfast Noir is an uneven collection overall, given that less than half of the stories would qualify as strictly noir. For the less pedantic reader, however, it is a fascinating document of its time and place, and one that showcases the diverse talents of an increasingly impressive generation of Northern Ireland crime writers. ~ Declan Burke
This review was first published in the Irish Times.
Friday, May 22, 2015
Event: Dennis Lehane at the Irish Writers’ Centre
Date: Thursday 28 MayFor details of how to book tickets, clickety-click here.
Time: 7.30pm
Venue: Irish Writers Centre
Fee: €18 / €15 IWC Members
Dennis Lehane, novelist, screenwriter and writer-producer, is set to release his latest novel World Gone By (Little, Brown) and will be joining us at the Centre to talk about this latest endeavour, writing for print and screen and will reveal all about the much discussed Love/Hate US adaptation.
Dennis Lehane grew up in Boston. His novels have been translated into more than 30 languages and have become international bestsellers and include Mystic River, Gone Baby Gone, Darkness Take My Hand and Moonlight Mile. His most recent work World Gone By, a psychologically and morally complex novel set in World War II was published March 2015. Three of his novels - Mystic River, Gone Baby Gone and Shutter Island - have been adapted into award-winning films.
Lehane was a staff writer on the acclaimed HBO series The Wire and is a writer-producer on the fourth season of HBO’s Boardwalk Empire. His film The Drop features James Gandolfini in his last movie role. It has recently been reported in the press that Dennis has been approached to adapt the Irish crime drama Love/Hate for a US cable television network.
Dennis will be interviewed by writer and playwright Declan Hughes.
Dennis will also be appearing at the Listowel Writer’s Festival on Friday, May 29th.
For a review of WORLD GONE BY, clickety-click here.
For an interview with Dennis, clickety-click here.
Wednesday, May 20, 2015
“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?” Peter James
What crime novel would you most like to have written?
Brighton Rock by Graham Greene. Set in my home town of Brighton, it is the book that made me want to become a crime novelist.
What fictional character would you most like to have been?
Gary Soneji, from the early James Patterson novels. He’s the shrewdest, smartest villain ever created and it would be fun to be evil in a fictional world.
Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
I don’t know if you’d call it a guilty pleasure or rubbernecking! But I love dipping into Vernon Geberth’s massive tome, Practical Homicide, packed with no holds barred crime scene photographs.
Most satisfying writing moment?
When I figure out how everything is going to fit together.
If you could recommend one Irish crime novel, what would it be?
Brian Moore’s Lies Of Silence. It has one of the most brilliant human dilemmas I’ve ever read in a novel.
What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
Brian McGilloway’s Hurt.
Worst / best thing about being a writer?
Worst thing: being stuck in a room, forcing yourself to write. Best thing: shutting out the outside world and writing in peace.
The pitch for your next book is …?
A girl disappears from an underground car park in Brighton. On the same night, the 30-year-old remains of a young woman are unearthed by builders. Has Brighton got its first serial killer in 80 years? Has Roy Grace finally met his match?
Who are you reading right now?
I’m reading Patricia Highsmith and finding her fantastic! I have seen Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr Ripley, but never read her novels. She is such a brilliant writer.
God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
Write. I’ve been a compulsive writer since I could first hold a pen. But I think that would make him a very cruel God indeed to force that choice on someone!
The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Character. Research. Plot.
Peter James’ YOU ARE DEAD is published by Macmillan.
Tuesday, May 19, 2015
Review: WORLD GONE BY by Dennis Lehane
By now a largely respectable businessman, albeit one who still has business interests in common with the notorious Meyer Lansky in Cuba, Joe Coughlin is respected and feared by his colleagues and enemies. A man who has always ensured that his associates in ‘the most powerful business syndicate in the Western hemisphere’ earned handsomely from his illicit ventures, and a former gangster who no longer has any power worth killing for, Joe is to all intents and purposes untouchable. So who has put a hit out on Joe Coughlin? And why would anyone want to kill him and disrupt the status quo?
These questions provide World Gone By, Lehane’s 12th novel, with its narrative spine, as Coughlin tries to discover who his enemies are and second-guess their motives, all the while trying to keep a lid on a race war that is threatening to explode as an ambitious Italian-American faction tries to muscle in on the Tampa turf of ‘the Negro gangster Montooth Dix’. There are thrills and spills aplenty as the story unfolds, but it’s in the flesh Lehane packs onto the bones that the novel truly comes alive. Joe Coughlin is a fascinating creation, a dignified savage who is every bit as vicious when it comes to defending his own interests – including, most notably, the life of his young son Tomas – as he is noble in his aspirations for a better, more rewarding life for those he holds dear.
He is a complex man, the black sheep scion of “a family tree whose branches had bent over the centuries with the weight of troubadours, publicans, writers, revolutionaries, magistrates, and policemen – liars all.” He is capable of falling in love with another man’s wife (in the process risking abject humiliation for them both) while still fiercely grieving for his dead wife, Tomas’s mother Graciela. He is acutely self-aware of his failings as a man and a father: “No,” he says in the wake of a shoot-out massacre, answering Tomas’s question as to whether he’s ‘a bad guy’, “just not a particularly good one.” Haunted by what appears to be the ghost of a young boy, Joe is unable to decide if he is hallucinating due to stress, experiencing a foreshadowing of his own mortality, or suffering a self-fulfilling prophecy born of years of subsumed guilt over the blood on his hands.
Ultimately, World Gone By is a novel about the turbulent transition of America’s criminal fraternity from the riotous gangster era, as epitomised by Joe Coughlin and his peers, to the post-WWII years and the more organised crime of the Mafia. Joe Coughlin, the former hot-headed punk who grew up to become a thoughtful strategist, straddles both worlds, although from the beginning Joe, one of the great tragic anti-heroes of contemporary crime fiction, is conscious that his is an untenable position, that fate itself decrees that blood must always be paid back in blood. “Sometimes,” Lehane writes, “when outrage begat outrage with enough frequency, it threatened the fabric of the universe, and the universe pushed back.” ~ Declan Burke
This review was first published in the Irish Times.
Monday, May 18, 2015
Event: Liz Nugent and Sinead Crowley at the International Literature Festival
Ever wondered how to write the perfect thriller? Or perhaps you’re a culture vulture who knows a lot about books? If so, The Big Book Club Show is for you!‘The Big Book Club Show’ takes place on May 20; for all the details on how to book tickets, etc., clickety-click here …
In the first part of the show, Irish Times Digital Editor Hugh Linehan talks to acclaimed thriller writers Liz Nugent (Unravelling Oliver) and Sinéad Crowley (Can Anybody Help Me?), asking how they went about creating characters who do terrible things.
In part two, The Big Book Club Quiz offers you a chance to test your literary knowledge against a team of experts captained by Hugh Linehan, and a crack book club squad captained by comedian and writer Colm O’Regan. Hosted with irrepressible cheek by Stephen Faloon, manager of the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre, who likes to award bonus points for clever answers and whisk them away for mistakes, The Big Book Club Show is a fast, fun and competitive night. You might even win a prize!
Also appearing at the ILF is Alexander McCall Smith, in a public interview on May 21. For all the details, clickety-click here …
Sunday, May 17, 2015
Review: ONLY WE KNOW by Karen Perry
This review was first published in the Irish Times.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Declan Burke has published a number of novels, the most recent of which is ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL. As a journalist and critic, he writes and broadcasts on books and film for a variety of media outlets, including the Irish Times, RTE, the Irish Examiner and the Sunday Independent. He has an unfortunate habit of speaking about himself in the third person. All views expressed here are his own and are very likely to be contrary.