Greetings, Hero

ISBN: 9780957142756 | 322 pages

Published Sept 2014 by  Honest Publishing UK

“A startling debut – wit and artistry, spliced to an imagination which has real ambition for the short story.”

– Mike McCormack (Notes from a Coma)

Available in bookshops in Ireland and the UK.
Highlight retailer: Hodges Figgis fast-mover price of €15.90

“Aiden O’Reilly’s stories of one-night stands and fraught relationships, of dreamers, drifters and migrant labourers, an academic crank at war with the legacy of the Roman Empire and a man who assembles a woman from a kit suggest complicated truths about who we are now and where we have come from. Greetings, Hero is a poignant, inventive collection by a writer distinguished by a rich and resonant voice.”
— Ashley Stokes (The Syllabus of Errors)

“The strongest debut collection I have read for some years”
— Quadrapheme

“If this (from an indie publisher) gets enough press, it’ll have rabid fans and furious detractors: we’ll be intrigued to see them slog it out.”
— Bookmunch

“O’Reilly’s very fine debut offer the reader a series of candid dispatches from a changing Europe. It is a volume defined by a sense of unease.”
— Val Nolan in the Irish Examiner

One of the stories previously appeared in Unthology 4, where the reviewer singled it out for special mention:
Finally, The Laundry Key Complex by Aiden O’Reilly goes deeper in its attempt to analyse the human condition, using residents’ misuse of the system of signing out the key for the laundry room in a student dormitory building as an indicator of a malaise in our social structures and attitudes. There is something almost Selfian in the way O’Reilly psychoanalyses wider cultural problems through a seemingly absurd microcosm, making this one of the most satisfying stories in Unthology.

Another story was given a mention by Derek Hand in his review of These Are Our Lives, an anthology from The Stinging Fly Press:
In Words Spoken Aiden O’Reilly brilliantly offers the reader a story of contemporary Dublin and the ordinary choices made in order to simply get by and survive.

... more reviews due soon

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Now available in Foyles in the UK, lots of independent bookshops across the UK, and most bookshops in Ireland. Can be bought online here Book Depository
 
 

Acknowledgements
Some of these stories or earlier versions have previously been published in The Stinging Fly, The Dublin Review, Unthology 4, Prairie Schooner, Ulster Tatler, and 3am magazine.