Jamie O'Neill

Praised as “a work of wild, vaulting ambition and achievement” by Entertainment Weekly, Jamie O’Neill’s first novel invites comparison to such literary greats as James Joyce, Samuel Beckett and Charles Dickens.Set during the year preceding the Easter Uprising of 1916—Ireland’s brave but fractured revolt against British rule—At Swim, Two Boys is a tender, tragic love story and a brilliant depiction of people caught in the tide of history. Powerful and artful, and ten years in the writing, it is a masterwork from Jamie O’Neill.Jim Mack is a naïve young scholar and the son of a foolish, aspiring shopkeeper. Doyler Doyle is the rough-diamond son—revolutionary and blasphemous—of Mr. Mack’s old army pal. Out at the Forty Foot, that great jut of rock where gentlemen bathe in the nude, the two boys make a pact: Doyler will teach Jim to swim, and in a year, on Easter of 1916, they will swim to the distant beacon of Muglins Rock and claim that island for themselves. All the while Mr. Mack, who has grand plans for a corner shop empire, remains unaware of the depth of the boys’ burgeoning friendship and of the changing landscape of a nation.

Never before published in the United States, "Disturbance," a wickedly funny, macabre story of obsession, is the first book by Jamie O'Neill, author of "At Swim, Two Boys."Nilus Moore is an Irish boy struggling to find his place in the world. He lives with his eccentric and capricious father in their shambolic house. The decay is overwhelming and Nilus notices every detail -- from a chipped cup to the crumbling plaster -- but when Nilus' uncle tries to demolish the house and build an office complex on the block, Nilus and his father take in boarders to save their home: Mrs. Houlihan, a medium; a blind piano accordionist; Father Mulcahy, a defrocked priest. On the surface, Nilus is calm, silent, fastidious, but he is a young man trying to cope with tragedy and chaos. Haunted by his mother's death, Nilus takes refuge in his bedroom, where he obsessively makes and remakes a matt-black jigsaw puzzle as he battles to keep control of his senses. Written with wry wit and deep compassion, "Disturbance" is a portrait of a mind disordered yet obsessed with order, a haunting and powerful work of incredible imagination.

O'Leary Montagu was born at age twenty-five - a difficult age, as he himself admits. For the past eleven years, which is as far back as he can remember, O'Leary has been sustained by two people: his girlfriend, Mary, traumatized by O'Leary's neuroses, and Nancy Valentine, author of Ill Fares the Land. Her memoir of an idyllic childhood in Kilbrack ends as she returns to the village after inexplicable banishment and finds it abandoned.Now Mary has left him, and O'Leary finds himself homeless and laboring under an ill-starred fate. With his treasured copy of Ill Fares the Land, he arrives in the dilapidated village of Kilbrack and finds it hasn't been abandoned at all: thin old Downey, the pharmacist, is still dispensing medicines and advice; Nellie Maguire is still languishing in her pub; and stout Mrs. Cuthbert, still frenzied, arranges for O'Leary to marry her daughter, who has vowed to become a nun.What has happened to Kilbrack? O'Leary's coming will change everything, but in a manner no one - in his right mind - could foretell.