Rick O'Shea

Sara Baume’s debut is a story of a 57-year-old reclusive unnamed narrator in a rural Irish town who, after the death of his father with whom he’d been living alone all his life, gets a one-eyed dog from the pound. This is their story; of the interior of his old house, their walks, what they see from the window. Sound less than thrilling? You couldn’t be more wrong. It’s been a long, long time since I read something that made me, no, demanded that I re-read whole paragraphs because the imagery and words within them were so beautiful. It’s beautiful, elegant, edible, […]

We view the world through a frame whether we realise it or not. All of us. It took me a long time growing up to realise that and it only really happened when, every now and then, a book came along that nudged the frame off-centre ever so slightly. Every time, afterwards, world looked different forever. It happened with stuff like No Logo, The Tipping Point, Black Swan, Freakonomics, anything I’ve ever read by John Pilger or Noam Chomsky. It has happened hugely here. Like everyone else, I thought I had a fairly decent handle on the idea of the “war on drugs” […]

Disclaimer – I know Shane, mostly just through online, but we’ve met a few times. Further disclosure – this makes it harder to review someone’s book just in case it’s crap, or just average, so you put it off sometimes. I needn’t have worried. Finn is twelve, lives in the small town of Darkmouth and his dad would like him to follow in his footsteps when it comes to his job. No, he has to follow in his footsteps. Finn’s dad is a legend hunter and the town they live in is the last place on Earth the legends appear. At any moment […]

  Here’s another one I feel a great shame about. Despite being a reader of SF since I was a kid I’ve always had my blind spots. Many of them I’ve been trying to redress over the last 2 years (Philip K. Dick, Iain M. Banks. Margaret Atwood, even bloody J.G. Ballard!) and now finally I’ve made it here, to the novel that made the word “cyberspace” a thing. In 1984. There’s no point in me attempting to explain the plot shy of telling you that Case is a hustler “hacker” who plugs into a vast, global dataspace matrix and […]

Following in my long tradition of not ruining the plots of books for you before you’ve actually read them, all I’ll tell you about The Girl On The Train are the bare bones. Rachel takes the train into work in London every morning. It usually stops at the same set of points opposite a row of houses where she sees a couple out on their balcony or through their windows. She names them Jess and Jason, even through she doesn’t know their real names. One day she sees something that shakes her, and the imaginary world of their relationship that she’s built up in her […]

  Came to this too late, it’s been sitting on the shelf for ages. It’s a hugely readable and keenly observed collection of small, delicate stories about quiet lives, small moments, people in fractured relationships. Everything from a woman finding our her ex-husband has dies in a climbing accident to marital infidelity with a sibling, a ‘sort of’ relationship by e-mail all the way to a man finding out that he’s almost at the end of his life. I’ve had a bit of an attitude change to collections of short stories recently. Over the years I’ve read everything from the brilliant Raymond Carver to collections […]