It's 412 BC, and Athens' invasion of Sicily has failed catastrophically. Thousands of Athenian soldiers are held captive in the quarries of Syracuse, starving, dejected and hanging on by the slimmest of threads. Best friends Gelon and Lampo live in a rapidly growing and changing city, jobless after their factory closed, Lampo still living with his mother at thirty, Gelon grieving the loss of his family. Unemployed and with little money, life revolves around visiting the bar and dreaming, all too aware that they are have nots in a world of haves. So far so familiar, only our protagonists live in Syracuse nearly two and a half thousand years ago, a city that, against all odds, fought off the Athenians three years before the book starts - which is why there are several thousand Athenian men imprisoned in their quarries, dying slowly of disease and starvation. Men who are so grateful for few scraps of food they'll recite poetry in return for olives. And Gelon really adores I will be buying this for myself and for others when it releases. I am truly thankful I was allowed to read it! Fear not,” says I. “We come not to punish, though you Athenian dogs deserve punishment. Gelon and I are merciful. We come—” What is remarkable about Dominoes is how it elegantly situates geo-political questions concerning the legacy of colonialism in Britain within preparations for a marriage. At its heart, the novel is a love story, but the romance is a catalyst for larger, messier questions of identity. “I tried to get into the zone of what a momentous change marriage can be and the fact that it can leave someone ripe for questioning themselves and asking—‘What am I? What do I want from this marriage?’ Those questions couldn’t be answered without [Layla] going down the rabbit hole of ‘who am I and what am I bringing to this relationship in terms of my family lineage’.”

Bradley has no plans to give up the publishing day job, preferring to write in the evenings after work. I loved this book. Fierce, funny, fast-paced. Glorious Exploits brings the ancient world roaring to life in a brilliantly non-stuffy way—as if the figures on a Greek vase turned round, offered you wine, and started chatting. Thoroughly enjoyable, occasionally brutal, and shot through with insight, pathos and hope. Reminiscent of Kevin Barry and George Saunders, but wholly original—an unforgettable debut." The novel features two friends, Lampo and Gelon who are unemployed potters during the Peloponnesian war. Syracuse defeated invading Athenians and imprisoned them in a quarry. The two friends like to go to the quarry and mess with them to pass the time. Gelon often has them recite from his favorite playwrite, Euripedes and gets the idea to stage a play with the Athenian prisoners as actors, the closest he ever gets to seeing his hero's work staged in Athens. We see the process as they bring it to life, securing an eccentric patron, getting to know the 'actors', collecting a group of children to assist, securing different elements they need, and promoting the play. Along the way we really get to know the characters and root for them even when they don't necessarily deserve it.

This book is delightful and original. It's genuinely one of the best I've read this year. It's written beautifully, with a narration in a contemporary Irish vernacular that brings an element of humor and makes the story feel modern and relatable. It's dark, deeply funny, with glimpses of hope scattered throughout. It's also very readable, I burned through it in two days because the story really immersed me and I wanted to see what happened next. I thought it was well paced and had a satisfying ending. Enter for a chance to win an early copy of Ferdia Lennon's hilarious and moving debut, GLORIOUS EXPLOITS! Enter for a chance to win an early copy of Ferdia Lennon's hilarious and moving debut, GLORIOUS EXPLOITS! ...more Not long after I went to the kitchen and cleaned the cups, the plate and spoons. I took special care with the plate and washed it twice. In a few minutes there was no trace that the old man or his dog had ever been there. Just a dark streak of red on the tiles which I scrubbed with boiling hot water.

Like his hero, Hilary Mantel, Lennon approaches an historical turning point—the Athenian invasion of Sicily during the Peloponnesian War—from an unexpected angle, writing about Athens and theatre from an illiterate Syracusan potter’s perspective. The online friends, for whom she was writing the original story in serial form-—“I’d write a chapter and they would read it and respond”—suggested she send it to a literary agent. I ask if she was tempted to break cover at that point, because Bradley is, of course, also a commissioning editor, now at Penguin Press, formerly at Granta. Alongside this editorial career she was also writing short stories. In 2022 she won two notable short story awards, the Harper’s Bazaar Short Story Prize and the V S Pritchett Short Story Prize. If a chorus of waiters brandishing a chocolate dessert singing “Happy birthday” is not a fortuitous sign of a wonderful conversation, I don’t know what it is. When I meet début novelist and actor Phoebe McIntosh at a café in King’s Cross on her birthday, she blows out the candle, contemplating her wish in a moment of stillness before we talk about her thought-provoking and electric début, Dominoes.I’ve tried to only discuss the themes of this book in this review, since I don’t want to spoil it, but I will just add that I thought the plot was interesting, well written, and thought-provoking. Being from the UK and having a particular interested in Bronze Age Britain I also loved the inclusion of a character being from the ‘Tin Isles’! Glorious Exploits is exuberant, funny, lyrical and profoundly moving. It is, quite simply, a rare beauty.” But as the audacity of their enterprise dawns on them, it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish between enemies and friends. As the performance draws near, the men will find their courage tested in ways they could never have imagined ... The story itself: a tale of overcoming differences, the power of art and love, brotherhood, romance, war, quests, victory, defeat, heartbreak, Glorious Exploits honestly had it all. It was both an epic and a tragedy and a comedy. The plot of the novel nearly mirrored the plays put on by the characters inside it. It was fully fledged and magnificent. Dominoes originally began as a one-woman stage show written and performed by McIntosh to have “something I could be cast in and that no one could say: ‘You’re not right for’”. In an online magazine article explaining why she penned the show, McIntosh stated: “I wrote ‘Dominoes’ when I’d started having concerns that perhaps my fair skin and blond curls, my half-Jamaican, half-English heritage—the things I’m told make me unique and interesting—were also making me too difficult for casting directors to cast and for agents to sign.” The positive audience response to the sell-out run at the 2013 Edinburgh Fringe Festival which was followed by winning a place on the Tamasha x Hachette Creative Writing Programme helped solidify McIntosh’s belief that “Dominoes” the show could become a novel.

The Ministry of Time is Sceptre’s superlead début for 2024, acquired in a 48-hour pre-empt. It has sold in 19 territories to date, and TV and film rights were optioned after a 21-way auction. The novel opens with the unnamed female civil servant narrator interviewing for a new job and learning that the British government has developed the means to travel through time. She will work as a “bridge”, a liaison and housemate, for an “expat” rescued from history: Commander Graham Gore (RN circa 1809-circa 1847). Four other expats (all fictional) are also brought into the 21st century. Having spent about seven years in Paris, Lennon now lives in Norwich with his family. He studied history and classics at University College Dublin, then graduated into the 2008 economic crash and taught English in Granada while making his first forays into writing. Later, he did an MA at UEA, taking Rebecca Stott’s “brilliant” historical fiction class alongside Imogen Hermes Gowar.

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The festival will be opened by Shirley Keane and Fiona Linnane; Saturday 25th will feature authors Casey King, Seán Hewitt, Donal Ryan, Claire-Louise Bennet and Maylis Besserie, who will be interviewed by her translator Clíona Ní Ríordáin and Doireann Ní Ghríofa. Maggie O’Neil will lead the Kate O’Brien Hour on Sunday 26th, preceding the presentation of the Kate O’Brien Award for 2023 with a reading by each of the three shortlisted authors, Sheila Armstrong, Emilie Pine and Olivia Fitzsimons. In At Swims-Two-Birds, Flann O'Brien gave us cowboys riding through Dublin. Now, Ferdia Lennon gives us modern-day Dubliners living among the ancient Greeks. This is a very special, very clever, very entertaining novel.” With this in mind, I thought the concept was cool, but I was reading the book for a pretty obscure reason that had nothing to do with the genre or plot. So I was very happy when I fell in love with it.