My Father's House: From the Sunday Times bestselling author of Star of the Sea (The Rome Escape Line, 1)

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A key example of this is O’Flaherty’s chaotic and confusing emergency night-time mission, delivering cash around the city, which forms the climax of the book. One unnamed cardinal is “a long drink of cross-eyed, buck-toothed misery if ever there was, he’d bore the snots off a wet horse. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. O’Connor is playing with the possibilities of multiple narrators, and thinking also about plurality, reliability and the historical record: is a collection of witnesses more accurate than a solo narrator?

The author’s sparing prose reflects the monotony of the coal merchant’s life, while capturing place and emotion to great effect.A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy. S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Joseph O’Connor has written historical novels on subjects as varied as the American Civil War, the Irish Famine (in his 2002 bestseller The Star of the Sea) and the life of Bram Stoker. Hauptmann embodies something of the terrible paradoxes in the heart of Germany in the 1930s — cultured and brutal, urbane and ruthless.

The boorishness of the occupying Nazis — they “slobber, brangle, murder folk songs” — contrasts starkly with the beauty of Rome itself. IN OUR next Book Club page, on 7 July, we will print extra information about our next book, Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan.Canon Richard Lamey is the Rector of St Paul’s, Wokingham, and Area Dean of Sonning, in the diocese of Oxford. And given that his “favoured interrogation tool is the blowtorch,” his odds look better than O’Flaherty’s. O’Connor also has consistent wit and lightness of touch — when, for example, some American servicemen insist on throwing balls from house to house across the street after they are told that they can’t go outside. The latter’s importance to the story is, of course, because of the Vatican’s supposed neutrality in the war, a neutrality echoed by that of Ireland.

Readers who enjoy the story will find an excellent bibliography at the end of the novel to find out more about O’Flaherty. Towards the end of the book, that gap shuts horribly as, casually and meaninglessly, Hauptmann executes someone whom we thought he liked.But he is forbidden to enter Vatican City, at one-fifth of a square mile, the tiniest country in the world. The novel is inspired by a real historical figure named Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty, an Irish envoy to the Vatican. O’Connor endows his O’Flaherty — whom he warns us is a fictionalised version of the man himself — with a near- encyclopaedic knowledge of the boltholes and rabbit warrens of Rome and Vatican City. This can be an effective storytelling device, but in this case, waiting for the private investigator heroine to get to where the reader is at the beginning of the story feels interminable.

From the map of Rome and the Vatican at the beginning that locates the action, to the classical three-act structure, to a central narrative that moves forward in time over one momentous day, there is a clear sense of authority, a composer at work. Only the heavy shellac telephones and the red metal fire-bucket announce the twentieth century as fact.Photograph: Patrick Bolger ‘Compassion in spades’: Joseph O’Connor, photographed in Killiney, Dublin. This formidable talent for writing across genres is reflected in his masterly 10th novel, which should reap similar plaudits. How effective did you find the different voices that O’Connor uses to tell his story, and the different types of writing, e. But the biggest problem is that this narrative is framed as a mystery without delivering the pleasures of a mystery. And he is a little overly fond of invoking national stereotypes, particularly the gesticulation and general emotionality of Italians — their “natural love of life” — and the volubility of the Irish.