© Kniha Zlin, 2009
A performance artist opens his chest and displays his beating heart on stage. A young man walks through the hills of south-west Romania, where the locals have peculiar ideas about gold. On the morning of a medical examination, a woman tries to coax her husband off the roof. A smuggler pays off an old debt to his sister and resigns himself to a life of honest toil in the mine-shafts of his home town. A mysterious rodent named Brigitte enters the lives of two old men. And, in the astonishing long story 'In the Neighbourhood', the inhabitants of a crumbling tower-block go about their business, unforgettably. The stories of Philip Ó Ceallaigh create a world that is utterly original and yet immediately recognizable - a world of ordinary people grappling with work and idleness, ambition and frustration, wildness and sobriety, love and lust and decay. Scabrously honest, screamingly funny and beautifully crafted, Notes from a Turkish Whorehouse is a brilliant début and winner of the 2006 Rooney Prize for Irish Literature.
Penguin Ireland 2006
Translated into: Czech
Lucy Luck
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