Aiden O'Reilly writer

It was a fantastic experience to be the 2025 Novel Fair judge alongside Declan Burke, Roe McDermott, John Patrick McHugh, and Lia Mills. I was familiar with the work of most of these writers, but had never met any of them in person before.

Over 120 extracts of 10,000 words, each with a 1-page synopsis. Six weeks to read them and whittle down to a short list of twelve. That was basically all the instructions. We were given free reign and told not to take into account the sales potential of the novel, nor Irish-relatedness, nor whether we should aim for a spread over genres. Just use our own judgement.

My own tastes can be deduced from my blog and the many reviews I’ve done. I like fiction that confronts the way the world has ceased to be a reasonable place and all is in flux. I’m sort of an antipode to the sentiment: “wasn’t it ever thus?”

Before I began I had an expectation – a hope even – that a certain proportion of entries might spontaneously self-select for the reject bin. I mean that within a couple of paragraphs it would become blatantly obvious that this was not up to publishable standard. It was not an unreasonable expectation; I’d chosen fiction for lit magazines before.

But with almost all of the entries I had to read to the last sentence of the 10,000 words. No shortcuts. They had generally been edited to a very high standard. That’s not a bad thing, but good editing is something that can be bought. I always kept that in mind to repress the mini grammar nazi within. When you get used to a certain industry-standard smoothness of prose it can prejudice you against a text that, for example, uses the word lightening instead of lightning. But a writer who has not studied a humanities subject at college might regard such details as superficial as the wrong font choice. (In some places that too can get a submission thrown in the bin.)

One hundred and twenty extracts. I got used to reading six a day. I initially labelled 31 of them to be read again. Then whittled that down to twenty-odd. It was tough making decisions after that. I find it hard to judge prose in a genre outside what I generally read. There were also some written in a cerebral style of prose, Banville style, that took some time to warm to. When you are grinding your way through thousands of pages of text, you can feel a superficial attraction to lightweight clear-running prose.

And then there were a few provocative novels: druggie escapades, cynicism, explicit sex, someone angry at the world, sceptical of sjw’s. That’s all fine by me; I’m a little bit biased toward such novels.

One extract featured a distinctly unlikeable young woman who juggles a number of fake social media profiles (often with images of blondes), sexting with men, then she has sarcastic thoughts about her social justice friends, all shot through with Diogenean-level misanthropy. The psychological portrait of the main narrator fascinated me, and it was a big plus (as a novel) that it was all set in modern Dublin, complete with Luas trips, boring office work, a woman thinking frankly about sex, and the escape into social media. I had the unavoidable but ultimately futile thought, “I wonder how much of the writer is this character.”

The author’s name was revealed when the final list was agreed. Ciara Broderick. The announcement of the sale of her novel was made last week, acquired by 4th Estate “in a nine-way auction” whatever the hell that means.

The events of the novel are set in the years from about 1944 – 1950. That’s 40 years after the Dublin depicted in James Joyce’s Dubliners.

And Brown’s Dublin is 36-odd years from my own childhood years – let’s say 1982. And from Dublin of 1944 to the present day is a huge 80 years. Yet I feel a surprising familiarity with the Dublin of Down All the Days. The sexual taboos, curse words, priests visiting, whispered mention of those who took to the drink, and also that absolute chasm between the world of children and the adult world – all this tugged at me, like a person encountered on a city street who insists you know them well from childhood.

Joyce’s Dublin on the other hand remains remote: that world of servants and British Empire and Royal this-and-that, classical concerts, and upper-class finery is gone.

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I was surprised to see very few reviews of this book anywhere. Great title, eye-catching cover graphic. This is fast-moving spikey fiction with libidinous women, office mayhem, prescription drug addiction – so why didn’t it get more attention?

Here’s a review I did for one of my favourite indie review sites, BOOKMUNCH

Extract from the review below:

Sounds like the stuff of a best-selling airport read. And it should be. But these are short stories and the gravitation to the label of Literature with a scroll capital L is strong. The author of such a book will have to be content with Respect and Residencies rather than a cash flow.

But Rosemary’s star is in the ascendant, and she’s received many awards. Her writing is only going to receive more attention, even if she never writes another thing.

These pages are peopled with quick-witted, charming, sexually voracious and feckless characters who don’t take well at all to a nine-to-five job. This type of character is more familiar in fiction (and maybe in reality) as a male. Rosemary presents the female version in several of these stories, and it’s genuinely disconcerting.

These stories make me aware of a frustration I feel with fiction that is crafted to speak to an audience with shared values. Such writing presents characters that we ‘love to hate’ or squeezes out our sympathy or evokes some specific response that the writer is aiming for.

Rosemary’s characters don’t come with hover labels. We meet cheaters and killers, the self-obsessed and the passionate, and are not sure how we’re to feel about them.

So yeah, you’re welcome to read the book as a mirror held to Belfast and its women. But I read it more as Rosemary’s encounters with characters who have fascinated and annoyed her, and this is her way of getting them out of her head.

I read this long ago, but no so long that it was a formative influence. It’s fascinating to revisit it – I really wonder if John Gray believes all of what he promulgates or if he’s being a provocateur.

This is a delectable read of ideas long familiar to me but which I thought had been forgotten. For who today would be interested in lack of ultimate purpose, the many ways science negates human values, the delusions of liberal progressives, etcetera.

Gray is good at showing we are still tormented by these ideas: so much so, it would seem they are an ineluctable part of human nature, which would negate the whole purpose of the book.

In his belief that such ideas have wide-scale trickledown impact, he comes across to me as leaning to the idealist side. He is not trying to argue that human affairs have been dominated by competition for resources, demographics, genetic similarity. No, he sees the errors of Plato and Christianity everywhere.

But what a fascinatingly contrary (stress on second syllable) book this is! You can freely pick up statements that contradict each other: We have the same concerns as our Paeleolithic ancestors; our ancestors would find us incomprehensible. Those who believe in technological progress are deluded; green thinkers are deluded. Humans have a deluded self-image that they are different to animals; humans are the ‘sick’ animal that thinks too much.

There are lots of books – some new agey, some by scientists – which perceive in Quantum Mechanics a space to escape from determinism and the cold mechanistic universe. QM has a central role for ‘the observer’. There is no one objective reality, it depends on how we conceptualise it, etcetera etcetera. The Dancing Wu Li Masters kind of thing.

But no dancing for Gray ho-ho. For him modern science shows that ‘the world humans are programmed to perceive is a chimera.’ We can never fully understand, we don’t have control.

The structure of each section generally follows the pattern: Consciousness? Bah, it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. Where consciousness can be substituted in turn with free will, morality, postmodernism, the self, progress, the war on drugs, the Buddha, Platonism, quantum mechanics, the scientific method, etc.

But I think he protests too much. He mentions the relatively obscure Federov, and clearly admires the fiction of Stanislaw Lem. Gray talking about the futility of grand narratives is like a preacher denouncing the evils of pornography who keeps showing one picture after another to the congregation and telling them how disgraceful it is.

For Gray, the invention of writing is the tempting apple that started it all. Writing is a memory-enhancing device that allowed humans to inhabit a world of abstract entities and lose themselves there. “Europe owes much of its murderous history to errors of thinking engendered by the alphabet.” – When I read this I think that somewhere else Gray will be arguing that people going to war delude themselves into thinking it’s about Big Ideas when it is generally about the fundamentals of resources and demographics.

I’m not going to undertake a systematic takedown of a book that is an unsystematic takedown of … well almost everything. Except for drugs. They really work.

Gray is ultimately someone who has reached the existential insight that Man creates his own meaning, and reaches this insight down several different winding paths one after the other. And then he sits in that space at the end of all these paths and does nothing.