“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

Friday, March 15, 2013

Darkness Visible: Michael Russell’s CITY OF SHADOWS

I’ve been hearing quite a lot about Michael Russell’s CITY OF SHADOWS (Avon) over the last few months, all of it very positive, and most recently from Joe Long – and if it’s good enough for the Long Fella, then it’s good enough for me. Quote the blurb elves:
“She looked up at the terraced house, with the closed shutters and the big room at the end of the long unlit corridor where the man who smiled too much did his work. She climbed the steps and knocked on the door …”
  Dublin 1934: Detective Stefan Gillespie arrests a German doctor and encounters Hannah Rosen, desperate to find her friend Susan, a Jewish woman who disappeared after a love affair with a Catholic priest. When the bodies of a man and woman are found buried in the Dublin mountains, Stefan becomes involved in a complex case that takes him, and Hannah, across Europe to Danzig. Stefan and Hannah are drawn together in an unfamiliar city where the Nazi Party are gaining power. But in their quest to uncover the truth of what happened to Susan, they find themselves in grave danger …
  Over at Writing.ie, Louise Phillips interviews Michael Russell about CITY OF SHADOWS, and during the chat elicited this:
“One of the problems with writing anything historical is that you’ve got to be very careful your characters don’t already know what’s going to happen, and although Nazism was extremely unpleasant, and there was already plenty of evidence of that [at the time the book is set], it’s not the case that people had the knowledge they subsequently learned, so therefore as the writer you have to look at it slightly differently. The association with the swastika flag was important too, and the incident in Chapter 2 came from an old photograph of a tricolour and a swastika flag hanging outside a Dublin hotel, the party held there was reported in the Irish Times as a great party, one for the German community. There were plenty of people who thought, again referring to an old photograph of a branch of Hitler Youth, formed by the German community in Ireland, that they were polite, they were disciplined and in the case of the Hitler Youth on that particular occasion, sang rather nicely.”
  For the rest, clickety-click here

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