Brouhaha

Dove Connolly is dead. That’s not good for anyone in Tullyanna, never mind Dove. Now his best friend Sharkey is home asking awkward questions about Dove’s death, about the strange graphic novel he left behind, and, most of all, about Sandra. Sandra Mohan.

Missing now for over a decade, whereabouts unknown. This, however, is a town dead-set on keeping its secrets. And Sharkey is already drawing attention from all the wrong quarters...

A mystery, a black comedy, a satire on Ireland’s tangled politics of memory, Brouhaha is set in a small town on the Irish border during the uneasy transition to peace. And peace doesn’tcome easy in these parts.

Author’s Note

About ten years ago I was touring my stand-up comedy show in England. Doing my due diligence on the town I was performing in one night, I stumbled upon a chilling, feature-length article about the mysterious disappearance of a local girl. It was clear that the whole town knew who was responsible but nobody spoke out. I thought it might be interesting to transpose a story like that - with some of its specifics, its misdirections - to the border region of Ireland where I grew up.

There you have a genuine culture of omertà given its long association with smuggling and paramilitary activity. On top of that, the people of the area have an idiosyncratic way with words, a dry and dark humour and a deadpan tone, all elements that lend themselves to the noir-ish story I wanted to tell - an Irish Fargo, if you will.

That said, while Brouhaha has some of the tropes of crime fiction, and hopefully some thriller momentum, I like to think it’s as much an existential novel, and a playful, satirical one at that, as an out and out potboiler. Most novels, good and bad (and mine definitely falls into at least one of those categories) are ‘existential’ in that they’re about characters trying to make sense of their messy lives, trying to figure out how to live, no less, trying to find meaning and definition - in this case through an urgent quest to find a missing person - in a seemingly meaningless world.

This book is satirical in the sense that my protagonists, an unlikely triumvirate of sleuths all with secrets of their own, who through jaundiced eyes observe the foibles and pieties and hypocrisies of the townspeople of Tullyanna and their ambiguity about violence and the events of the past, as well as their paralysis in terms of moving forward.

In short I wanted to write the kind of book I like to read - insightful, thought-provoking, edgy, funny, humane and above all entertaining.

Ardal O’Hanlon

‘‘The first thing to say about Ardal O’Hanlon’s Brouhaha is that it is very good. By good I mean it is humane, clever, funny, gripping, complex, serious and surprising. I laughed out loud, and I sat and wondered about the horrible truths. That is no small achievement….exceptionally good’’ – The Scotsman

 ‘‘Could very easily be mistaken for an Irish literary classic if it wasn’t so damned funny.'‘ – The Irish Times