Lampo and Gelon are local potters, young men with no work and barely two obols to rub together. When they take to visiting the nearby quarry, they discover prisoners who will, in desperation, recite lines from the plays of Euripides for scraps of bread and a scattering of olives.

Sure they are broke, their potential actors are despised, hated and dying, they have no theatre experience or scripts, but when the duo find an actual actor and realise that thanks to him, they can put on not just Medea but also Euripedes new play The Trojan Women, a work not yet seen or heard in Syracuse, the dream takes on a life of its own. I’ve tried to only discuss the themes of this book in this review, since I don’t want to spoil it, but I will just add that I thought the plot was interesting, well written, and thought-provoking. Being from the UK and having a particular interested in Bronze Age Britain I also loved the inclusion of a character being from the ‘Tin Isles’! The festival will be opened by Shirley Keane and Fiona Linnane; Saturday 25th will feature authors Casey King, Seán Hewitt, Donal Ryan, Claire-Louise Bennet and Maylis Besserie, who will be interviewed by her translator Clíona Ní Ríordáin and Doireann Ní Ghríofa. Maggie O’Neil will lead the Kate O’Brien Hour on Sunday 26th, preceding the presentation of the Kate O’Brien Award for 2023 with a reading by each of the three shortlisted authors, Sheila Armstrong, Emilie Pine and Olivia Fitzsimons. What is remarkable about Dominoes is how it elegantly situates geo-political questions concerning the legacy of colonialism in Britain within preparations for a marriage. At its heart, the novel is a love story, but the romance is a catalyst for larger, messier questions of identity. “I tried to get into the zone of what a momentous change marriage can be and the fact that it can leave someone ripe for questioning themselves and asking—‘What am I? What do I want from this marriage?’ Those questions couldn’t be answered without [Layla] going down the rabbit hole of ‘who am I and what am I bringing to this relationship in terms of my family lineage’.” Like his hero, Hilary Mantel, Lennon approaches an historical turning point—the Athenian invasion of Sicily during the Peloponnesian War—from an unexpected angle, writing about Athens and theatre from an illiterate Syracusan potter’s perspective.What an absolute blinder of a book! Glorious Exploits is a refreshingly unique take on the current trend for novels set in Ancient Greece. It chooses a bold historical setting: the aftermath of Athen’s most infamous disaster, the Sicilian expedition, where thousands of Athenians lost their lives and several thousand were imprisoned in stone quarries near Syracuse. And in this grim war-ravaged setting it creates a story both laugh-out-loud funny and brutal: we follow Syracusan Lampo as he and his pal Gelon attempt to stage two plays by Euripides (Medea and Trojan Women). The catch? Well, Lampo and Gelon are but lowly unemployed potters, fond of the drink. And they’ve decided the only proper way to stage Euripides is with an Athenian cast.. They would share their thoughts on the individual explorers, some hugely famous and others relatively unknown, and one day Bradley admitted to the group: “By the way, my favourite is this guy that no-one cares about, Graham Gore, he’s not in any books, he’s not really in the archives, but I love him.” The online friends, for whom she was writing the original story in serial form-—“I’d write a chapter and they would read it and respond”—suggested she send it to a literary agent. I ask if she was tempted to break cover at that point, because Bradley is, of course, also a commissioning editor, now at Penguin Press, formerly at Granta. Alongside this editorial career she was also writing short stories. In 2022 she won two notable short story awards, the Harper’s Bazaar Short Story Prize and the V S Pritchett Short Story Prize.

It's 412 BC, and Athens' invasion of Sicily has failed catastrophically. Thousands of Athenian soldiers are held captive in the quarries of Syracuse, starving, dejected and hanging on by the slimmest of threads. This time two of the Spartans laugh, and all four salute. Ah, I feel so happy today. I can’t explain it, but it’s some feeling. Those are the best ones. The ones you can’t explain, and we haven’t even fed the Athenians. Fig Tree publishing director Helen Garnons-Williams said: “Reading Ferdia’s novel for the first time felt like a jolt of electricity. It’s an extraordinary achievement and we are incredibly excited to be publishing it at Fig Tree. His writing is bold and beautifully crafted, darkly funny, thrilling, and profoundly affecting. Glorious Exploits is an unforgettable novel about brotherhood and war, beauty and violence and about our collective urge to tell stories and make art even in the direst of circumstances and the darkest of times.” But as the audacity of their enterprise dawns on them, it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish between enemies and friends. As the performance draws near, the men will find their courage tested in ways they could never have imagined ... The Ministry of Time is Sceptre’s superlead début for 2024, acquired in a 48-hour pre-empt. It has sold in 19 territories to date, and TV and film rights were optioned after a 21-way auction. The novel opens with the unnamed female civil servant narrator interviewing for a new job and learning that the British government has developed the means to travel through time. She will work as a “bridge”, a liaison and housemate, for an “expat” rescued from history: Commander Graham Gore (RN circa 1809-circa 1847). Four other expats (all fictional) are also brought into the 21st century.If you’ve been reading your mythology retellings, you might think you know your Ancient Greeks. Well, hold onto your laurel wreaths, because Ferdia Lennon’s exuberant début will take you on a wild ride into antiquity as you’ve never seen it before. Glorious Exploits is a tragicomic tale of artistic ambition rising from the ashes of war, bringing hope and friendship.

Water and cheese,” says Gelon, “for anyone who knows lines of Euripides and can recite them! If it’s from Medea or Telephus you’ll get olives too.” Gelon raises his club, and the bluffer slinks away. Another takes his place. This one at least mentions Jason, but it’s a bit Gelon already knows. Still, he gets a few olives for his troubles. But when it came to finding representation for The Ministry of Time, she submitted to agents under a pseudonym. “I didn’t want people who I knew, or were my friends, to feel like they had to read it… ‘Oh my God, she wants me to read her novel, what do I do? What if I hate it?’ I also didn’t want a situation where they felt awkward turning it down, I wanted it to be simple”. One perennial challenge is choosing what to omit from a mountain of research. To absorb the classical mentality, Lennon read extensively, intending to write about the Peloponnesian War. His eureka moment came when he decided that, like Homer’s “Iliad”, which chronicles the rage of Achilles rather than the whole Trojan War, he would focus on a short episode.Best friends Gelon and Lampo live in a rapidly growing and changing city, jobless after their factory closed, Lampo still living with his mother at thirty, Gelon grieving the loss of his family. Unemployed and with little money, life revolves around visiting the bar and dreaming, all too aware that they are have nots in a world of haves. So far so familiar, only our protagonists live in Syracuse nearly two and a half thousand years ago, a city that, against all odds, fought off the Athenians three years before the book starts - which is why there are several thousand Athenian men imprisoned in their quarries, dying slowly of disease and starvation. Men who are so grateful for few scraps of food they'll recite poetry in return for olives. And Gelon really adores Lennon’s fiction has appeared in The Irish Times and the Stinging Fly and his stories have been nominated the Hennessy Emerging Writer Award and the Galley Beggar Short Story Prize. In 2019 and 2021, he was awarded Arts Council bursaries. I mean, I’ve never not had a day job but I found it helpful to have that structure. One book does not a writing career make…so I think it’s very unwise to bank on this idea of becoming a career writer because that’s not something that is afforded to most writers.”

I will be buying this for myself and for others when it releases. I am truly thankful I was allowed to read it!I nearly cried on the tube reading it on my tiny phone, I could imagine scenes in the climax as clearly as if they were played on a movie screen in front of me. You will not know until you read it what the desperation of that hill and that fence in the night felt like. It felt vivid and real! And that is such a rarity. Glorious Exploits is exuberant, funny, lyrical and profoundly moving. It is, quite simply, a rare beauty.”