Conor O'Callaghan

A frightened girl bangs on a door. A man answers. It is the hottest summer in living memory, in a country that sounds like Ireland: post-boom, in ruins, depopulated. The girl has words scrawled in blue on her burned flesh. The girl stays with the man. She tells him about her mother, her mother's identical twin, her father, and their strange shared life in the show house of an unfinished development on the outskirts of a desolate town. Nothing on Earth is a true mystery. What does the town remember about the twins? Where has everybody gone? When nobody remains to tell the story of the girl's family, the man repeats it to a world that doubts his every word. Beautiful and terrifying, his disturbing testimony reaches toward those frayed edges of reality where each of us - if only once - glimpses something nobody will ever explain.

Nothing on Earth

'compelling and Profoundly Moving' Irish Times

We Are Not in the World

'Stylish, deft...an absolutely fascinating novel' Guardian 'Haunting, mesmerising, and so deeply intelligent' Kamila Shamsie, author of Women's Prize for Fiction winning Home Fire 'Powerful...compelling and profoundly moving' Irish Times 'Heartbreaking, sweetly logical and tentatively hopeful' Spectator Heartbroken after a long, painful love affair, a man drives a haulage lorry from England to France. Travelling with him is a secret passenger - his daughter. Twenty-something, unkempt, off the rails. With a week on the road together, father and daughter must restore themselves and each other, and repair a relationship that is at once fiercely loving and deeply scarred. As they journey south, down the motorways, through the service stations, a devastating picture reveals itself: a story of grief, of shame, and of love in all its complex, dark and glorious manifestations. ______________ What readers are saying: ***** 'The prose is sublime and deeply moving . . . a stunning novel' ***** 'Beautifully written, lyrical and unsettling in its exploration of human frailties, family, love, and loss, grief' MORE PRAISE FOR WE ARE NOT IN THE WORLD: 'Unusual, utterly original and mysterious . . . a must read' Elaine Feeney '...the book stays with you, a haunting presence you cannot - and do not want to - escape...astounding.' Ruth Gilligan Extraordinary...achingly sad and tender and sexy, and the writing is very beautiful.' Louise Kennedy 'Wonderful, wrenching . . . full of enormous feelings very precisely rendered' Sara Baume 'Elusive, unsettling, beautiful, haunting. This is a complex, devastating study of human relations; a portrait of intense love and damage in equal measure.' Lisa Harding 'A whirlpool of memories, regrets and hopes' Tim Pears 'An uncanny ability to turn the seemingly insignificant into something monumental' Jan Carson

‘compelling and profoundly moving’ Irish Times

This first collection is united by an awareness of elemental forces, of how those forces can influence experience, and by the poet's constant need to arrest moments when history and the individual glance against each other.

The History of Rain

Conor O'Callaghan's first collection in eight years includes an elegy for the 'boom', an office building's 'server room', and a string of couplets from Twitter.

Conor O'Callaghan

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