Rick O'Shea Picks His Books Of 2019

The likeable Rick O’Shea has become a sort of book reading figure head in Ireland over the last few years. The radio DJ, and 2009’s “sexiest radio voice” award winner, came across a book of Arthur C. Clarke short stories when he was a young lad in school and was particularly taken with ‘The Nine Billion Names Of God’ – a story referenced in this year’s Quichotte by Salman Rushdie, a fact Rick was unaware of until I smugly blurted it out, so score one for the in no way insecure Hot Press guy who didn’t win Irish Celebrity Mastermind. “It just kind of took from there and here I am all these years later still doing pretty much the same thing.”

Moving into arts broadcasting by hosting The Poetry Programme on RTÉ, he now takes over The Book Show on radio one, a dream job he considers his holy grail – “I was asked "would you be interested in doing a book show?" and I went "yeah, thank you very much" without really thinking about it.” The show will feature the expected authors and readings and Rick is determined to cater for “a vast majority of mainstream readers so as well as literary fiction, we’ll have crime fiction, mainstream fiction, some non-fiction, and hopefully delve into young adult and kids books as well.” No better man for the job considering the staggering success of the book club he set up on Facebook which boasts close to 29,000 members, a group he initially thought might attract “a few 100 like minded souls who all want to talk about books.” We asked Rick to select some of his favourite books of 2019, and here’s what he came up with.

The Fire Starters - Jan Carson
“Jan is a brilliant author from East Belfast and this is one of the most beautifully written books I've come across in years. There are two characters, from opposing sides of the divide in Belfast, both who find themselves in unusual situations with regards to their own sons, it's very modern, set during the marching season, but there's a huge track of fantasy that runs through it and I don’t want to tell people any more than that. It's an unusual combination which missed out on the Irish book awards. I keep hammering on about it because I think it's one people should read.”

Night Boat To Tangier - Kevin Barry
“Barry is in the top two or three authors this country has, and I don't think he’s ever put a foot wrong in terms of anything he's written. This has a huge dose of Beckett in it, two Irish ex-gangster sitting in the port of Algeciras, waiting for a daughter who may be going in or coming out on a ferry from Tangier, they're not 100% sure. They sit, talking a bit about their past and there's flashbacks to that past in Cork. I was dying for this book to show up and it's a three-course meal in terms of how beautifully it’s written.”

Leonard and Hungry Paul - Rónán Hession
“Rónán is better known as Mumblin' Deaf Ro who was nominated for the Choice Music Prize a couple of times, it's his first novel, from a small UK publisher but it's appeared on best book lists throughout the year. It did manage to get nominated for the Irish Book Awards and it is an incredibly gentle, incredibly simple story, again of two guys of a certain age but these guys are the almost exact opposite of Kevin Barry's characters. They are normal, lovely people with perfectly ordinary jobs, and one of them lives with his Mammy. It’s a gentle kind of love letter to the nature of friendship between men without any of the drama.”

Girl - Edna O'Brien
“Just because she's Edna O'Brien and this book is extraordinary, it's set in Nigeria and the main character is a girl who's abducted by Boko Haram. She’s a teenager who is taken from her school and made the wife of one of the fighters. It's her story and the story of the horrific and terrible things that happen to her and then what happens when all these girls are liberated and how she may or not be readjusted into her own society and how people accept her or don't. It's all about Nigeria but as it’s Edna, you can read a lot of other things into it and you could very easily read it as a parable of Irish life at a certain time as well. A lot of what happens to her, particularly in the early stages, are not easy things to read so you'd need to gird your stomach for it.”

Don’t Touch My Hair – Emma Dabiri
“The last one is a non-fiction. Emma is from Rialto, Emma is black so she kind of stood out growing up. She lives in the UK these days, she's an academic who also does TV shows for BBC4. This book is about the nature of having hair when you're black, what it means culturally, but everything from that all the way up to the use of fractal maths in Africa and their origins there and how they come from hair design. It's completely eye-opening and obviously a world I do not belong in and yet she writes so compellingly that I found myself getting dragged in. She tells an amazing story.”

Rick is currently reading Emer McBride’s forthcoming novella Strange Hotel and has just finished Eoin Colfer’s Highfire, an adult fantasy involving a sweary, alcoholic Dragon who lives in the Louisiana Bayou due out in the new year. Like us all, he has more books than he can ever read and therefore requests that if anyone fancies buying him a Christmas present, they can make a donation to his book club’s appeal in aid of the Peter McVerry Trust at idonate.ie/bookclub, and fair play to him. Before he goes, I ask if there’s a classic that he's never read which he’d like to tackle.

“Oh God, yeah, there are huge holes, I only read my first Charles Dickens novel three years ago. I've never read Tolstoy or Jane Austen. Everyone has their  blindspots, a huge amount of what I read is work-based and it's all contemporary. There's tons of stuff, but I'm only one human!”

Rick O’Shea hosts The Book Club, Sundays at 7pm on RTÉ Radio 1