» Update your details

• Extract
• Synopsis
• Reviews
• Product details
• More

• Biography

Synopsis

In Dublin, a newspaper editor called Cartwright is found dead. One of his colleagues, Owen Simmons, discovers a dossier on Cartwright's desk. And in the dossier Owen finds a photograph, which brings him back, once again, to a dusty road in Africa and to the woman he once loved …

Not Untrue and Not Unkind is Owen's story - a gripping story of friendship, rivalry and betrayal amongst a group of journalists and photographers covering Africa's wars. A remarkably assured and mature debut, it is a tale utterly for our times.

Reviews

Critic Review:

"Fantastic writing, great subject; a voice that is both passionate and cold. The most exciting first novel I have read in many years."
- Anne Enright

"A fine, darkly authoritative novel"
- Joseph O'Neill

"A remarkable first novel: edgy, angry and utterly individual."
- Christopher Hope

"Brilliantly transports the reader to Africa through the eyes of a war correspondent...this novel oozes authenticity and is gripping: I finished it in one sitting."
- Emma Giacon, Amazon

More

Brendan Barrington, editor at Penguin Ireland has only the words Not Untrue and Not Unkind for Ed O'Loughlin's Booker Longlisted novel.

“Ed O’Loughlin is a native of Canada, was raised and educated mostly in Ireland, worked in South Africa and was employed for a number of years by an Australian newspaper group. This history caused me to start thinking of him, while preparing to publish his first novel Not Untrue and Not Unkind, as the perfect Penguin author – a writer with meaningful links to four of the company’s best-established outposts. Sure enough, when the novel was published, a gratifying proportion of the initial sale (an unusually healthy sale for a first-time novelist) was accounted for by Canada, South Africa and Australia – not to mention Ireland, which is usually pretty good at supporting its new novelists. When the novel was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize – edging out not only books by Irish stalwarts Colum McCann and John Banville, but also the offerings of Margaret Atwood and the rest of the Canadian entry for the year – a debate started in the Canadian press: What is a Canadian novelist? Is Ed O’Loughlin one?

More importantly, Ed’s personal history informed the novel itself – though here we enter murky territory. The obvious connections between elements of Ed’s CV and the experiences of Not Untrue and Not Unkind’s protagonist, Owen Simmons, caused some journalists (always more excited by the fiction produced by their colleagues) to wonder if the novel was ‘all true’. I once found myself on the phone with one of these journalists, and I told her – with complete honesty – that I had no idea what was based on real events and what invented. Like Owen, Ed is Irish and worked as a journalist in Africa. Beyond that – and this is one of the glories of the novel – it is impossible to guess; and when you actually read the novel (which I suspect that journalist had not), the question does not really arise. If you can pull yourself away from the spell the story weaves long enough to think about it, you might find yourself concluding that only someone who had been in the places described, and had experiences akin to the events narrated, could possibly have written these sentences, these paragraphs – and so I’m sure it must be, in certain passages. But in its structure, its tone and its storytelling, Not Untrue and Not Unkind is every inch a novel. Its truthfulness comes not from any adherence to ‘facts’ but from a much deeper kind of engagement. I am certain that if Ed were ever to walk me through the novel, explaining which scenes were based on his own experience and which wholly imagined, I’d be very surprised.”

- Brendan Barrington, Senior Editor, Penguin Ireland

Product details

Shipped within 24hrs.
FREE UK Delivery*

• Full delivery details

• » View your basket