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The Lammisters by Declan Burke

The Lammisters cover

'This bourbon-smooth riot of jazz-age excess, high satire and Wodehouse flamboyance is a pitch-perfect bullseye of comic brilliance.' Irish Independent Books of the Year 2019

'This rapid-fire novel deserves a place on any bookshelf that grants asylum to PG Wodehouse, Flann O'Brien or Kyril Bonfiglioli.' Eoin Colfer, Guardian Best Books of the Year 2019

'The funniest book of the year.' Sunday Independent

'Declan Burke is one funny bastard. With The Lammisters, he has presented us not alone with a book full of bootleggers, starlets, pirates, movie moguls and knaves in a Damon Runyon/Blackadder mash-up, but he also conducts a forensic analysis on the anatomy of a story, showing a healthy and justified contempt for scribblers. Ultimately, an enjoyable jape from first to last.’ Liz Nugent, Unravelling Oliver, Lying in Wait, Skin Deep

'Never mind arguments about crime fiction and genre. Declan Burke is his own genre. The Lammisters dazzles, beguiles and transcends. Virtuoso from start to finish.' Eoin McNamee, The Vogue

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Synopsis

Hollywood, 1923. Having ascended into the pantheon of America’s Most Wanted by dispatching his mortal foes to the holding pens where Cecil B. DeMille keeps his expendable extras, Irish bootlegger Rusty McGrew goes on the lam with the shimmering goddess Vanessa Hopgood, her enraptured swain Sir Archibald l’Estrange-B’stard, and Edward ‘Bugs’ Dooley, the hapless motion picture playwright who has stepped through the looking-glass into his very own Jazz Age adaptation of The Pilgrim’s Progress.

Delighting in rapid-fire dialogue, subversive genre-bending and metafictional digressions, The Lammisters is a comic novel that will likely be declared a wholly original comedy classic by anyone who has yet to read Flann O’Brien, Jane Austen, PG Wodehouse or Laurence Sterne.

About Declan Burke

Declan Burke is the author of six novels, three of which were shortlisted in the crime fiction section of the Irish Book Awards. Absolute Zero Cool – described by John Banville as ‘a cross between Raymond Chandler and Flann O’Brien’ – won the Goldsboro Award for comic crime fiction in 2012. Declan has also edited, or co-edited, three titles, two of which were collections of essays, the third being a collection of Irish crime fiction short stories. As a journalist and critic, Declan writes and broadcasts on books and film for a variety of media outlets, including the Irish Times, RTE and the Irish Examiner.

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