'Oisín Fagan announces himself as the best new young writer in
Ireland'
- Colin Barrett
An ambitious noble and his three serving men travel through the
Irish countryside in the stifling summer of 1348, using the
advantage of the plague which has collapsed society to buy up
large swathes of property and land. They come upon Nobber, a tiny
town, whose only living habitants seem to be an egotistical
bureaucrat, his volatile wife, a naked blacksmith, and a beautiful
Gaelic hostage. Meanwhile, a band of marauding Gaels are roaming
around, using the confusion of the sickness to pillage and reclaim
lands that once belonged to them.
As these groups converge upon the town, the habitants, who up
until this point have been under strict curfew, begin to stir from
their dwellings, demanding answers from the intruders. A deadly
stand-off emerges from which no one will escape unscathed.
"A dark and bloody tale, well leavened with bone-dry humour, and
with a dramatic climax that has about it the flavour of a Jacobean
tragedy"
- The Guardian (full review)
"Pestilence, the Black Death and comedy combine to bemusing and
occasionally potent effect in this debut novel from the rising star
of Oisin Fagan ... Nobber is a lively and mischievous work that does
a wonderful job of painting pictures for us of abject horror and
suffering right before turning them over onto their backs to reveal
soft comedic underbellies"
- Irish Examiner (full review)
"All tremendously good fun: if noir whimsy and highfalutin'
bawdiness are your thing, you will find a chortle-worthy moment on
every couple of pages ... Fagan is a skilled storyteller with a rich
command of language and rare comedic flair"
- Irish Times (full review)
"Amid a strange, dark tale come glimpses of a striking new
talent"
- The Times (full review)
"Oisin is a true original. Nobber is brilliant, innovative,
relevant, zany, and highly readable"
- Irish Examiner (full review)
"Pestilence, the Black Death and comedy combine to bemusing and
occasionally potent effect in this debut novel from the rising
star of Oisin Fagan . . . Nobber is a lively and mischievous work
that does a wonderful job of painting pictures for us of abject
horror and suffering right before turning them over on to their
backs to reveal soft comedic underbellies"
- Irish Independent (full review)
"[This] surreal, plague-ridden tale is set to become an Irish cult
classic"
- Sunday Business Post (full review)
"Fagan's gleefully ornate prose is full of sly jokes and infused
with humour that is less black than acid-bright . . . enough
energy, absurdist wit and genuine strangeness to carry the reader
through until the end of this ambitious, inventive novel"
- The Sunday Times (full review)
"Nobber is an ode to precarity, one that I think will live beyond
its generation, serving as both an instructive allegory and a
highly readable work of fiction"
- Pank Magazine (full review)
"Fagan imbues the book with a hallucinatory shimmer, an almost
overpowering medieval viscerality beginning at the edge of madness
and gleefully pushed ever further. It’s a wild ride"
- The Herald (full review)
"Fagan’s medieval Ireland isn’t much different from ours: people
follow their hearts, or their greed, down misguided paths, they
hurt each other, they comfort one another. Everything is fragile;
the human race is fleeting. And if true goodness is impossible, we
might as well laugh on our way to hell"
- Totally Dublin (full review)
