THE STARVED LOVER SINGS

“Colin O'Sullivan's writing is an antic, mordant and perverse plunge into strange and unnerving worlds.” —Colin Barrett

It's the not-too-distant-future and a certain Asian country is in physical and moral tatters. What was once a polite society has become fouled and corrupted. Part-time referee and full-time P.E. teacher, Tombo, stands in the middle of all this, trying to find balance in his own life, as things continue to crumble around him. Added to his personal miserie – missing–presumed-dead daughter, eerily silent wife, unrequited lusts – comes the unwanted, unwarranted attention of two, mean-spirited, wrathful adolescent girls, who have decided that he is to be their “chosen one”. Can this harangued everyman battle against the forces that envelop him, or will he too fall to the whims of the new dystopia? Bold, risk-taking, wildly ambitious, formally daring, often a mix of the comic and macabre, it is marvellously inventive, full of wordplay and literary trickery. As well as being an absurd existential novel it is also a political satire, and a cautionary tale about what may lay ahead, therefore a novel very much for our times.

Colin O'Sullivan grew up in Killarney and now lives in the north of Japan and works as an English teacher. His short fiction and poetry have been published in various print and online anthologies and magazines, including A Living Word (anthology of Irish writers), Staple New Writing, The Stinging Fly, These are Our Lives and Cork Literary Review.