Desperate to assert control, Berlin sends a new Gestapo Head to break O’Flaherty’s network and terrify the city into obedience. Written in the first person past, these recollections have the feel of dramatic monologues (a Dutch female journalist is particularly good), and reflect the author’s experience as a playwright. IN OUR next Book Club page, on 7 July, we will print extra information about our next book, Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan.

My Father’s House (The Rome Escape Line Trilogy, 1)

The Financial Times and its journalism are subject to a self-regulation regime under the FT Editorial Code of Practice. Historical details are scattered like gems throughout My Father’s Voice: a Panzerjager anti-aircraft cannon, the ‘Me ne frego’ slogan of the Fascists, the horror of the Nazi prisons in Rome: “Four thousand frightened prisoners crammed like abused beasts, half starved, into a couple of barbed-wired stony fields.O’Connor also has consistent wit and lightness of touch — when, for example, some American servicemen insist on throwing balls from house to house across the street after they are told that they can’t go outside. Part of O’Connor’s genius is that we hear O’Flaherty’s own voice and see him through the narration of his friends. This unsettling encounter causes him to question both his and the town’s ability to screen out the uncomfortable truths about the Madgalene laundries. Beautifully crafted, his razor-sharp dialogue is to be savoured, and he employs dark humour to great effect. It resonates because of the compelling pas de deux of Hauptmann and O’Flaherty, each of them carrying a burden that is slowly crushing them.

My Father’s House book review: Irish priest who defied Nazis My Father’s House book review: Irish priest who defied Nazis

And for anyone who has been lucky enough to spend time in Rome and pick up enough of the language to get by - you're in for a real treat! I was reminded of the novels of John Boyne, Kate Atkinson, and most unusually, Andrew O’Hagan’s wonderful novel on fame, Personality, which has a similarly dazzling way with voice and historical period detail. It’s a choral book in two senses: the group meets as a choir and rehearses chamber music to provide aural cover for whispered plans and communications, and the structure of the novel uses the idea of part-singing, each character having a voice and a tune, the sum more than the parts. Hugo remembers his shameful foolishness in seeing “all political systems as more or less the same … the prattling of apes, designed to keep the lesser chimps down”. O’Connor is playing with the possibilities of multiple narrators, and thinking also about plurality, reliability and the historical record: is a collection of witnesses more accurate than a solo narrator?It's another part of the book where O'Connor excels, such is his attention to detail of the buildings in the basilica. There are near misses, scenes of intense physical suffering and rising jeopardy, particularly as we also see vignettes of Hauptmann’s evening. This felt like a mismash of genres—historical fiction, potboiler thriller, and literary fiction rolled, unsuccessfully, into one. How effective did you find the different voices that O’Connor uses to tell his story, and the different types of writing, e. Her novella Foster is now included as a text for the Irish Leaving Certificate and was described by The Times as one of the top 50 works of fiction to be published in the 21st century.