Séamas O'Reilly

A heart-warming and hilarious family memoir of growing up as one of eleven children raised by a single dad in Northern Ireland at the end of the Troubles After the untimely death of his mother, five-year-old Séamas O'Reilly and his ten siblings were left to the care of their loving but understandably beleaguered father. In this thoroughly delightful memoir, we follow O'Reilly and the rest of his rowdy clan as they learn to cook, clean, do the laundry, and struggle (often hilariously) to keep the household running smoothly and turn into adults in the absence of the woman who had held them together. Along the way, we see O'Reilly through various adventures: There's the time the family's windows were blown out by an IRA bomb; the time a priest blessed their thirteen-seater caravan before they took off for a holiday on which they narrowly escaped death; the time O'Reilly worked as a guide in a leprechaun museum during the recession; and of course, the time he inadvertently found himself on ketamine while serving drinks to the president of Ireland. Through it all, the lovable, ginger-haired O'Reilly regales us with his combination of wit, absurdity, and tenderness, creating a charming and unforgettable portrait of an oddly gigantic family's search for some semblance of normalcy.