Life Sentences

A sweeping historical epic about one Irish family’s fight for survival – the most ambitious novel yet from the Costa-shortlisted writer, for fans of Colm Toibin and Sebastian Barry

Billy O'Callaghan's writing is so good and true it feels almost magical; Life Sentences is a beautiful book, a small epic, a joy.

O'Callaghan is amongst the finest storytellers and wordsmiths in Ireland today.

The strength of Life Sentences lies in its long range but intimate style . . . A reader could profitably finish the book and go straight back to its beginning

People who read Sebastian Barry, Donal Ryan, Liam O'Flaherty will really love [Life Sentences] . . . It's my book of the year so far.

A superb and moving novel . . . O'Callaghan is one of our finest writers, in the tradition of John McGahern and Brian Friel, and this is his best work yet.

Life Sentences brilliantly immerses us in its respective time periods, and . . . O'Callaghan's natural gifts as a writer . . . the author often coming out with a stunning turn of phrase.

Lyrical, poignant, gripping . . . O'Callaghan weaves together a narrative that is compelling and dazzlingly rendered.

The reader is invested from the start . . . So poetically elegant as to be breathtaking . . . Life Sentences is writing at its finest.

O'Callaghan's prose is mesmerising in its beauty . . . Profound, moving, sometimes shocking, [Life Sentences is] from the pen of a writer at the top of his game.

One of the most beautiful books of the year.

Sam Blake, #1 Irish Times bestselling author of the Cat Connolly trilogy

The novel I most look forward to is Billy O'Callaghan's Life Sentences.

The accomplished writer . . . O'Callaghan has proved an empathic and expert diviner of the extraordinary in ordinary lives.

An absolutely stunning book . . . A truly beautiful read.

A lyrical prose reminiscent of William Trevor, and a haunting family drama.

One of the most exciting literary talents to emerge in the last decade.

*THE #3 IRISH BESTSELLER* 
 
'Momentous and epic' BERNARD MACLAVERTY 
'Superb and moving' JOHN BANVILLE 
'A lovely, piercing book' SEBASTIAN BARRY 
 
Three generations. More than a century of famine, war, violence and love. 
 
At sixteen Nancy, the only member of her family to survive the Great Famine, leaves her small island for the mainland. Finding work in a grand house on the edge of Cork City, she feels irrepressibly drawn to the charismatic gardener Michael Egan, sparking a love affair that soon throws her into a fight for her life. 
 
In 1920, Nancy's son Jer has lived through battles of his own as a soldier in the Great War. Now drunk in a jail cell, he struggles to piece together where he has come from, and who he wants to be. 
 
And in the early 1980s, Jer's youngest child Nellie is nearing the end of her life in a council house, moments away from her childhood home; remembering the night when she and her family stole back something that was rightfully theirs, she imagines what lies in store for those who will survive her. 
 
'Brilliantly immerses us in its respective time periods' SUNDAY TIMES

The Boatman and Other Stories

The poignant short story collection from the Costa-shortlisted Irish writer who ‘grips from the opening page’ (Bernard MacLaverty)

The best fiction I have read this year is Billy O'Callaghan's short-story collection The Boatman. The book is old-fashioned in the best sense, in that it is written by a grown-up for grown-up persons, as Virginia Woolf said of Middlemarch. The stories are taut, subtle and moving, and brought off beautifully.

Wonderful stories… A masterclass... The reader is lulled into a false sense of ordinariness that gives way — sometimes gradually, sometimes abruptly — to a moment of cataclysm…that leaves the reader reeling… There is no denying the power of his words… O’Callaghan’s stories are beautiful, plain and simple, and each one is devastatingly good.

Billy O'Callaghan writes beautifully... In evoking atmosphere, such a key element in the short story, he is matchless... His prose is a feast after a famine... The luxuriance of the language, the agility of the sentences, and the depth of the reflections. These stories are like classical sonatas... The writing is invariably delightful.

A shining example of how [short stories] can distil and intensify a writer’s gifts… These 12 stories confirm [O’Callaghan’s] delicate craftsmanship, unflashy narrative and descriptive skill, and his deep understanding of powerful and universal emotions… Breathtaking… Masterly… Irish writing has put out many new and more consciously modernist shoots in recent years, all welcome. But Billy O’Callaghan belongs now in the recognised front rank, along with Bernard MacLaverty, Edna O’Brien, William Trevor and Colm Tóibín.

[Billy O’Callaghan] makes epics out of the unspoken, the barely said, the half-hinted at, the wordless nod… This is O'Callaghan's quest, to reveal who his characters really are, especially when they're burdened with life's cruelties. And in chronicling the bravery sometimes required in simply putting one foot in front of the other, he makes heroes of the humblest of us.

There is marrow in The Boatman and Other Stories… [With] unforced gravity and lyricism… O’Callaghan is a reliably consummate performer, and these stories focus on the glimmer of heart in the hardness of life.

A master of the form… O’Callaghan’s descriptive powers are wonderful… O’Callaghan keeps the reader coming back for more, proving himself a master of the hook, one devastating line that grabs you by the scruff of the neck and refuses to let go.

Deeply affecting stories…and deeply attentive to the perils and poignancies of daily life… nuanced, moving—an impressive collection.

O'Callaghan is...a wellspring of great story ideas, and this imagination is writ large across The Boatman &amp; Other Stories... O'Callaghan's sense of place is vivid and impressive... John Banville, Edna O'Brien and John Boyne are all effusive in their praise for O'Callaghan's muscular, quietly assured writing.

Allow this collection of short stories to sweep you away… Each poignant story in this collection grips you… What better way to devastate the reader than to show just how happy people can be?

From the very talented Billy O'Callaghan... elegiac, carefully conceived tales of ordinary lives.

From heartbreak to love, we see relationships unfold with honesty. O’Callaghan paints wonderful pictures and brings the reader into the moment with him.

The breathtaking short story collection from the Costa-shortlisted Irish writer 
 
Three gunshots on the Irish border define the course of a young man's life; a writer clings fast to a star-crossed affair with a woman who has never been fully in his reach; a fisherman accustomed to hard labour rolls up his sleeves to dig a grave for his child; a pair of newly-weds embark on their first adventure, living wild on the deserted Beginish Island. 
 
 Spanning a century and two continents - from the muddy fields of Ireland to a hotel room in Paris, a dingy bar in Segovia to an aeroplane bound for Taipei - these densely layered tales reveal the quiet heroism and gentle dignity of ordinary life. Ranging from the elegiac to the brutally confrontational, Billy O'Callaghan's stories explore the resilience of the human heart and its ability to keep beating even in the wake of grief, trauma and lost love. 
 
'The best fiction I have read this year... Taut, subtle and moving, and brought off beautifully' John Banville, Best Books of 2020, Irish Times

My Coney Island Baby

An exquisite, heart-breaking novel about the end of an affair by an new Irish voice

Novel of the year is My Coney Island Baby, by Billy O’Callaghan, a lush, precise, poetic account of a love affair that ends the way most love affairs do. We knew O’Callaghan to be a master of the short story, and here he shows the grand reach of his powers as a novelist.

Billy O’Callaghan’s new novel grips from the opening page. The stride of his sentences is long and powerful, his vision raw. A spectrum of intensities from grief to love is revealed as relationships unfold with an honesty that is utterly believable.

O’Callaghan [has made a] significant achievement in this fine novel… Good books remind us of other good books and in its treatment of adultery this one calls to mind thematic ancestors such as Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina and The Scarlet Letter.

A poignant, piercing meditation on middle age and the passing of time… these characters will linger with you long after the book is closed.

Quiet, subtle and deeply moving… This is a fine novel, with elegance and wisdom lying beneath an unpretentious surface and O’Callaghan, a gifted writer, has managed to do that most difficult of things: take a quiet, almost everyday story and transform it into a thing of beauty.

[My Coney Island Baby] is the story of two ordinary people trapped in their ordinary lives. But in the hands of O’Callaghan it is magnified to the truly extraordinary. A great tragedy. I long thought Anita Brookner the high priestess when it comes to telling the tales of loneliness and defeat. But she’s now got company.

My Coney Island Baby is that rare thing: a love story that manages to be romantic and realistic… Billy O’Callaghan describes their love with a truthfulness that is often heart-rending... [his writing] demands to be taken slowly and savoured.

One of the finest Irish fictions of last year.

Billy O’Callaghan’s work is at once subtle and direct, warm and clear-eyed, and never less than beautifully written. He has a moving ability to express the hopes and fears of “ordinary” people, and he knows intimately the ways of the world. He richly deserves an international reputation. This writer is the real thing.

A welcome voice to the pantheon of new Irish writing.

Intensely romantic… [Billy O’Callaghan] is a writer who has an unyielding faith in the strength and vitality of language to convey the emotions and the physical world. In this sense, he is old-fashioned, straight out of the much-neglected D.H. Lawrence school of writing… he is also a writer who knows how to control his characters, his narrative, and… his voice. That’s what counts, and it’s what makes My Coney Island Baby such a good novel.

With poeticism and aching sensitivity, O’Callaghan unknots the minute workings of these starved adulterous souls… images rendered here stick with you, such is the intensity that they shimmer with.

A tender, slow-burning depiction of love. This is a powerful must-read.

Like a modern-day Lady Chatterley's Lover... There is much to savour in [My Coney Island Baby].

Imbued with poignancy and portent… [My Coney Island Baby] is redolent of Bernard MacLaverty’s The Bleak Midwinter, with its dissection of a relationship, and the weight, physical and otherwise, of growing old.

[O’Callaghan’s] narrative skilfully zooms in and out, circulating from their Coney Island hotel room to the lives they have left behind.

Vividly rendered… O’Callaghan excels at painting a portrait of physical and emotional isolation.

[O'Callaghan's] writing is just gorgeous.

A wise, tender, and exquisitely tuned novel about the end of a love affair in middle age. O’Callaghan’s style is rich and sonorous, and he surveys his characters’ ageing bodies and dwindling horizons with a dauntless eye, yet with such compassion that the final effect is to enhance their dignity.

Edmund Gordon, a judge of the RSL Encore Prize 2020

'A poignant, piercing meditation on middle age and the passing of time… will linger with you long after the book is closed' Guardian 
 
*SHORTLISTED FOR THE ENCORE AWARD 2020* 
 
On a bitterly cold winter’s afternoon, Michael and Caitlin escape their unhappy marriages to keep an illicit rendezvous. Once a month, for the past quarter of a century, Coney Island has been their haven; these precious, hidden hours their only nourishment. But now, amid the howling of an angry snowstorm, the shut-down, out-of-season resort feels like the edge of the world. And their lives, suddenly, are on the brink – with news of serious illness on one side, and a move to the Midwest on the other.

Billy O'Callaghan

Imaginative, beautifully told... Billy O'Callaghan arranges the story superbly

As the moving story unspools, O'Callaghan proves himself the most engaging of storytellers

The Paper Man is Billy O'Callaghan's most ambitious work to date, and it fulfils its ambitions magnificently. Exciting, moving, perceptive and wonderfully entertaining

A beautiful, layered novel about love, football and family. As the world falls apart in its darkest hours, this story tells of a life so bright, it echoes on into the generations: so that even in tragedy, there is always hope

Gorgeous. Billy O'Callaghan writes with such a spirit of warmth about the darkest of subjects

Sara Baume, author of A Line Made by Walking

Billy O'Callaghan's writing is powerfully emotional and wholly captivating from page one. The Paper Man is the best book yet by a truly gifted Irish writer

Gabriel Byrne, author of Walking with Ghosts

History&rsquo;s inherited burden presses firmly on the characters in Billy O&rsquo;Callaghan&rsquo;s The Paper Man... O&rsquo;Callaghan moves his narrative deftly between the Vienna of the Anschluss, rural Austria before the Nazi takeover and early 1980s Ireland

**A BOOK OF 2023 IN IRISH TIMES, RTÉ GUIDE AND SUNDAY INDEPENDENT** 
 
An unforgettable and sweeping interwar love story, from the Costa-shortlisted and bestselling Irish author of Life Sentences 
 
'Gorgeous' SARA BAUME 
'His most ambitious work to date' JOHN BANVILLE 
'A beautiful, layered novel' ELAINE FEENEY 
 
1980s Cork. Jack Shine discovers a shoe box full of love letters in his mother's belongings. Rebekah came to Cork alone as a young Jewish refugee from Vienna when the Second World War broke out. She died soon after, and Jack never learned of his father's identity. Why did she keep newspaper clippings about a famous footballer player? Who was 'The Paper Man'? 
 
As Jack uncovers his mother's life, he is transported to 1930s Vienna, a bustling city on the brink of war. At the heart of the action is Matthias Sindelar, one of the most famous footballers in the world, known as 'The Paper Man' because of his effortless weave across the pitch. When Sindelar unexpectedly meets Rebekah, both of their lives are changed forever. As war looms, they must accept that their survival will tear them apart. 
 
Based on true events, The Paper Man is the story of twentieth-century Europe and love against the odds. It is a story that will take Jack far from Cork and all the way back to Vienna, and towards The Paper Man.

Billy O'Callaghan

Praise for The Paper Man

Imaginative, beautifully told... Billy O'Callaghan arranges the story superbly

As the moving story unspools, O'Callaghan proves himself the most engaging of storytellers

The Paper Man is Billy O'Callaghan's most ambitious work to date, and it fulfils its ambitions magnificently. Exciting, moving, perceptive and wonderfully entertaining

Imaginative, beautifully told... Billy O'Callaghan arranges the story superbly

As the moving story unspools, O'Callaghan proves himself the most engaging of storytellers

The Paper Man is Billy O'Callaghan's most ambitious work to date, and it fulfils its ambitions magnificently. Exciting, moving, perceptive and wonderfully entertaining

Imaginative, beautifully told... Billy O'Callaghan arranges the story superbly

As the moving story unspools, O'Callaghan proves himself the most engaging of storytellers

The Paper Man is Billy O'Callaghan's most ambitious work to date, and it fulfils its ambitions magnificently. Exciting, moving, perceptive and wonderfully entertaining

Books by Billy O'Callaghan

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