“Declan Burke is his own genre. The Lammisters dazzles, beguiles and transcends. Virtuoso from start to finish.” – Eoin McNamee “This bourbon-smooth riot of jazz-age excess, high satire and Wodehouse flamboyance is a pitch-perfect bullseye of comic brilliance.” – Irish Independent Books of the Year 2019 “This rapid-fire novel deserves a place on any bookshelf that grants asylum to PG Wodehouse, Flann O’Brien or Kyril Bonfiglioli.” – Eoin Colfer, Guardian Best Books of the Year 2019 “The funniest book of the year.” – Sunday Independent “Declan Burke is one funny bastard. The Lammisters ... conducts a forensic analysis on the anatomy of a story.” – Liz Nugent “Burke’s exuberant prose takes centre stage … He plays with language like a jazz soloist stretching the boundaries of musical theory.” – Totally Dublin “A mega-meta smorgasbord of inventive language ... linguistic verve not just on every page but every line.Irish Times “Above all, The Lammisters gives the impression of a writer enjoying himself. And so, dear reader, should you.” – Sunday Times “A triumph of absurdity, which burlesques the literary canon from Shakespeare, Pope and Austen to Flann O’Brien … The Lammisters is very clever indeed.” – The Guardian

Monday, June 16, 2008

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: WHAT WAS LOST by Catherine O’Flynn

Catherine O’Flynn’s debut novel was first published way back in January 2007, but it recently won the Costa First Novel Award, a coup for its independent Birmingham-based publishers, Tindal Street Press. However, a year and a half later, the subject matter is still relevant and captures the zeitgeist, as it explores the impact that a missing child has on a community and various individuals 20 years after the event.
  O’Flynn divides her narrative into four separate parts, which skip from the voice of Kate Meaney, the 10-year-old amateur detective who vanishes without a trace from Green Oaks shopping centre in 1984, to those of Lisa, a disenchanted deputy manager at a chain music store, and Kurt a security guard who keeps seeing a little girl on the CCTV footage in the dead of night. Both live in 2004, and Kate’s disappearance has affected each in different ways.
  Disparate other voices are also interspersed into the main body of the story; all are anonymous, reflecting the centre’s unification but ultimate isolation of very different people.
  O’Flynn splices a variety of genres in WHAT WAS LOST: she successfully mixes crime tropes with those of literary and women’s fiction and the result is a touching, often funny, tale of love and loss within the sterile confines of a homogenous shopping centre and its fractured, post-consumerist community. – Claire Coughlan

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