Shortlisted for the 2008 Wodehouse Prize for comic fiction.
The novel's prologue won the biggest prize in the world for a single short story - the BBC National Short Story Prize.
"Sheer comic brilliance" - The Times
"The best comic novel I've ever read" - Tommy Tiernan
"Could be the finest comic novel since Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman" - The Sunday Tribune
My first novel, of which I am very fond. The adventures of teenage twin sisters Juno & Juliet, in their first year away from home. Life, love and literature, in Galway and Tipperary.
"Like Roddy Doyle in an extremely good mood" - The Washington Post
"A modern, at times brilliantly ironic reworking of the classical fairytale, with nods to Shakespeare, Austen and Beckett." - Literary Review
"Hugely entertaining" - Vogue
Closed Loop
I
You can only astonish them once.
Afterwards, to your surprise
You find that you are still alive
Bringing better and better work
To a smaller and smaller audience.
II
You enter the valley of the post-structuralists
Everywhere their guns, magnificent
Point straight down, or straight up
Innovative, revolutionary, and useless.
III
The poems you wrote were spare and unpeopled.
Nobody cared.
You weren’t writing for them.
You weren’t writing for you.
The process continued. Usually at night.
Semi-automatic, like gunfire
Or ivy climbing a dead tree.
IV
Inconvenient and absurd
Words which cannot be sold
Continue to emerge
At night, keeping you awake
Like stigmata, or flatulence
Selfless and selfish,
Speaking only of themselves.
Eventually you don’t even bother to turn on the light.
They pile up on top of each other
Like industrial products without an industry
Ghosts of something we don’t need.
Not even the thing itself.