PRAISE FOR JUDE'Sheer comic brilliance'
The Times'Julian Gough is a wonderful writer'
Sebastian Barry'Julian Gough gives a new shine to an antique mode, the Quixotic picaresque, as he relates the antic adventures of a Tipperary orphan. It's clever, it's nuts, and there are moments of comic greatness'
Kevin Barry, Irish Times, Books of the Year, 2007'Clever and laugh-out-loud hilarious'
Mail on Sunday'This is funny. It is also, possibly, quite serious. Certainly, it endears'
Irish Times'Gough's novel is like the picaresque bastard love-child of Flann O Brien and Matt Groening, and yet is all Julian Gough. Possibly the finest comic novel to come out of Ireland since
At Swim Two Birds, it recounts the story of Jude, an orphan, as he wanders through Ireland in a quest to find his true love and uncover the secret behind his parentage . . . Gough makes it look easy, with an instinctive sense of timing, and a razor sharp and subversive intellect'
Sunday Tribune, Books of the Year, 2007'Twenty-first century Irish satire has well and truly arrived thanks to
Toasted Heretic frontman, Julian Gough'
Metro, Fiction of the Week'
Jude makes most other contemporary Irish novels look like a pile of puke'
Olaf Tyaransen, Evening Herald'Like Flann O'Brien before him, Gough has written a highly effective satire of contemporary Ireland by combining an eye for bizarre detail with a relentlessly anarchic prose style and structure . . .
Jude in Ireland is an extremely original and surprising book which goes some way to making up for the dearth of literary responses to the changes brought by the Celtic Tiger.
Jude in Ireland succeeds where few have tried in making us laugh at the grotesqueness of 21st-century Ireland.'
Sunday Independent'Outrageously comic and satirical . . . a madcap romp which mercilessly sends up some of the sacred cows of modern Ireland, and even uses child abuse in an orphanage as a source of fun. It s a brilliant story (a sort of Celtic Tiger Myles na gCopaleen) guaranteed to put the painful into laughter.'
Irish Independent'Gough's preoccupation with the Greeks at the time of Aristophanes comes across in his writing, echoing the belief that comedy is superior to tragedy, being the Gods' view. That is not to say that
Jude is not a serious novel; it is deeply humorous, but Gough is deadly serious in his writing . . . With his inventive approach to publishing and disregard for literary conventions, Gough has written an epic novel for the 21st century, which, truly, no one else could have written.'
Aesthetica Magazine'Julian Gough's
Jude in Ireland manages an opening line that is bound to become a part of literary history . . . I defy any Indian reader to read the account of a Fianna Fáil political rally at the beginning of the book and not find it both familiar and hilarious . . . A ridiculous, brilliant piece of writing.'
Sunday Guardian, India 'A tour de farce, a comic chronicle of the history of the Irish psyche which takes the reader from the middle of the 20th century to the post-Celtic Tiger
ennui of today, at breakneck speed.'
Galway Advertiser --...
--This text refers to the
Paperback
edition.
April 2007: The prologue to "Jude" - "The Orphan and the Mob"
has been awarded the 2007 National Short Story Prize by a jury that
included novelists A.S. Byatt and Monica Ali, and Radio 4's Front Row
presenter Mark Lawson. An extract (c. 4000 words) was read on Radio 4 by
Beckettian actor Conor Lovett.
Jude is, in the author's words, "An attempt to write the most serious comic
novel of the young millennium"; it is certainly one of the funniest. Levels
II and III will be published online in instalments, beginning in July 2007,
with a hardback of the whole to follow in 2008.
"Julian Gough is so good a writer, he should probably dispense with plot.
What he has is an outstanding talent for comic scenes and for an evocation
of balmy good nature." The Observer
"Intelligent and deliciously dry, Gough's sparkling words can't fail to
make you sit up, listen and laugh." Glamour
"Like Roddy Doyle in an extremely good mood" Washington Post
--This text refers to the
Paperback
edition.
