Rick O'Shea

As has been the fashion over the last few years I throw up a bunch of titles I think you might like to bring away to whatever Spanish resort, Galway gaff, Tuscan villa or Tibetan monastery you’re heading to for your holiday 🙂 They vary wildly in tone, genre and even when they were released but they all come with a personal stamp of “well worth your time”. The only criteria I’ve used is that I must have read them this year. Enjoy. Everyone Brave Is Forgiven by Chris Cleave  Set in World War II the story of Mary North who starts the […]

I was honest with Chris Cleave when I met him and interviewed him a while back for one of my book club public events. If I hadn’t needed to read it for the sake of research, a new novel set in the midst of World War II might not have been at the top of my list of priorities. It’s a crowded field. Good thing I did, so. Mary North starts the story skiing down the side of a mountain (almost James Bond-like!) to enrol in the war effort the day hostilities break out. She thinks that, perhaps, as the […]

Now that I look back I can’t believe the randomness that brought Liz Nugent’s debut novel Unravelling Oliver to my attention (read about it here). With Lying In Wait, as with the last time, she grabs you by the throat with the first line “My husband did not mean to kill Annie Doyle, but the lying tramp deserved it.’” – I defy you to not want to read on from there. No spoilers, in fact I’m not even going to give you a plot. Just read it. As much as I adored and pressed the first book into the hands of many […]

Right. There’s been a problem for a while and I need to address it if I’m going to continue to review books here. It’s simple enough. I’m fairly overwhelmed at the moment with RTE work, other work, running the book club, reading for upcoming interviews I’m doing, writing myself (and just having a normal life outside of all that!) so, as a result, my reviews here have fallen way behind. Just as an example – I’ve written 18 reviews this year so far but the book I’m reading at the moment is book 36… See my problem? Thus – the […]

I’ll keep this brief as it’s the sort of book that is either preaching (pun intended) to the converted or will be avoided like the plague depending on where you stand… For me it argues many of the same points as Richard Dawkins The God Delusion in fairly much the same fashion wandering thorough the nature of the origin of religions,  why they exist, why people cling on to them and his thoughts about the damage they have done and continue to do. I have “Arguably” (his enormous collection of collected pieces and essays) which covers a lot of the same […]

It’s one of the better work tropes of this part of the world in recent times – what if the Axis powers had won the second world war? More specifically, what if Japan was the ruler of America decades later and, in a setting not dissimilar to Philip K. Dick’s legendary The Man In The High Castle, life went on? It in, Beniko Ishimura is a government censor of video games, there’s a new, unapproved one in which the USA won the war and it may be part of a bigger conspiracy that threatens Japanese rule there. It’s depiction of America […]