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What the experts are saying:

'Kafka goes west, meeting Mann out on the peninsula. Always original, Quinn shaves language making it sparse and spare: to suit his unique focussed vision. I like what he's doing in this book. Read it.'
-Patrick McCabe, author
 
"Bob Quinn is a filmmaker, but this is a highly literary novel, as well as a knowledgeably musical one. He takes us from the central-European demonism of Mann's Doctor Faustus to the rural Irish schizophrenia of Patrick McCabe's Butcher Boy without lifting anything from his precursors. A brisk, unsettling read."

-Raymond Deane, composer

Both regional and universal, this is a nightmare tale of surrealist vision – where reality merges with delusion, the Faust legend embroils itself with Kafkaesque science-fiction, a doomed marriage clashes and clangs among the rocks of Connemara and the paradoxical survival of the Irish language, while the whole mad gallimaufry holds itself together upon a central driving theme of the art of music, its glories, its futilities, its ultimately unbreakable power.  A novel of Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall, where everything has changed and yet nothing has changed: jealousy, sex, the passion of creation (plus the everlasting deadly struggle between creation and interpretation) are the dominating forces: the world as seen by Quinn from the Western margin of Ireland has its own strange skewed shape, unimaginable from any other viewpoint.

-John Arden, playright