RaveThe Irish Times (IRE)... started life as a screenplay called Greed, which has been expanded out into this hugely impressive and skilfully crafted debut novel. It shifts between time and the perspectives of its unpropitious characters, through Big Houses on the Border, Dublin criminal underworlds, as well as Belfast’s new cityscapes, awakening out of the bitter grandeur of the old industrial city. Though it begins unpromisingly, with James \'Ructions\' O’Hare assembling a team of criminals and/or former paramilitaries, its dialogue is sharp and venomous, boding well for the inevitable film it will morph back into ... O’Rawe writes stylishly without glamorising these men ... It feels we are being allowed to peer in on an old job. O’Rawe’s confidence as a storyteller takes off as the heist begins, dropping you in all kinds of damned places, with piercing echoes of Maurice Leitch’s merciless but pitch-perfect 1981 tale Silver’s City ... the novel we have been waiting for from one formerly involved in the Troubles. Here is a writer who has lifted himself out of the trench of communal politics recalibrated as literature, where every book, play or poem is a continuation of the struggle, the \'Brits\' always the villains, a united Ireland always the end goal. It marks a step forward for Troubles protagonist literature (and, perhaps, Irish republicanism itself) by moving beyond it, confirming the arrival of a creative voice of note and potential.
