Rick O'Shea

  For most of David Shafer’s Whiskey Tango Foxtrot I was sold. He creates a global conspiracy driven by high capital and tech giants to privatise the information. All of it. And then sell it back to us at a premium thus, in essence, controlling the world in that Corporatocracy way most of us believe has been happening for decades. We fall into the story through Leila, an NGO worker who comes across something she’s not supposed to see in the jungles of Myanmar, Mark, a globally famous self-empowerment guru who’s on the verge of a nervous breakdown and Leo, the token conspiracy […]

  Where on earth do I begin with this? I’m not going to try and explain the storyline of Reif Larsen’s second novel I Am Radar because that would take half the fun out of it. Imagine a story (mostly) centred around a young man with black skin born in the 70s in New Jersey to white parents and who later has unnatural abilities with radio and electricity via a collection of scientists cum performance artists working from a hidden base in the Arctic they used to hide from the Nazis, an unnaturally talented puppeteer in Bosnia in the 90s, a remote […]

  Part of my reading habits over the last couple of years has been to make small piles of older books that I feel I should have read a long time ago. Christopher Priest falls squarely in that category, where better to start than with his book in the Gollancz’s SF Masterworks series? The premise is beautifully, brilliantly bizarre – Helward Mann lives in an enormous city called Earth on an alien planet colonised by humans. The city must constantly move on tracks across a vast desert being laid as fast as possible by teams of citizens or else it will be […]

Sadly this didn’t end up being what I had wanted it to be. The initial premise is one I’m all about (that the human race has become obsessed with stuff, things, money and the like hugely to the overall detriment of our mental health). However while it starts by laying out the thesis well (the section on the birth of advertising is particularly good) it gets bogged down. After a while and quickly descends into chapters of complexity even my brain wasn’t equipped to handle interspersed with what seems to be the blindingly obvious (the billionaire in New York who has everything […]

If you ever read here regularly you’ll know how much I hate summarising books, so I won’t, save to say it’s set in modern-day Cork in a world of crime bosses, teenage drug-dealers, drug pushers, prostitutes, accidental murderers and long-term love and family all wrapped up in incredibly real, fallible, rare human characters. Love/Hate it’s far from though. Think more along the lines of Goodfellas or The Godfather on the Lee. This is, joyously, in that tiny sliver of books I read every year that I press on to people and insist they read. It fizzes, it crackles, it kicks […]

I’m a smidge ashamed to admit I’m new to Denis Johnson and that a huge part in my decision to read this was the glorious cover photo from Richard Mosse’s The Enclave exhibition. Glad I did. Ronald Nair is a shady Scandinavian obviously ex-intelligence services operative drawn back to Freetown by an African former friend/colleague/associate Michael Adriko. Michael has a plan for a heist and a new fiancée. I don;t want to reveal any more as usual. I’ve read a fair few reviews online of people taking this far too seriously or presuming Johnson should be writing far more seriously. Read it on the top […]