When you spend your childhood pretty much in solitary in the company of books in rural Waterford and your youthful years traveling in Eastern Europe doing many jobs like writer, newspaper editor, freelance journalist and volunteer for clinical trials, you certainly develop a knack of storytelling with the capital of experience you have gathered while traveling. Philip Ó Ceallaigh 1968 born Irish storyteller has lived this life and developed fabulous style of story writing. Philip has a command over 6 languages and he has translated Romanian playwright, essayist and novelist Mihail Sabastian’s autobiographical novel ‘For two thousand years’.

According to Eve Patten; Philip has developed an ambitious story writing style with long narratives and taking time to evolve the mood giving reader a time and space to see and think in between the drifts and stretches of prose. (https://www.irishtimes.com/news/when-time-slows-down-1.705527) He has avoided using the set Irish storytelling style and sets his stories in various places around the world where his protagonists of the stories are either solitary male or a female leading happening life. He has acknowledged being influenced in his writing style by Charles Bukowski, Anton Chekhov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Ernest Hemingway, Jack Kerouac, and Ivan Turgenev.

I would like to put his debut short story collection containing 19 stories ‘Notes from a Turkish Whorehouse’ on my TBR list through this blog. “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 debut from a writer who cannot be ignored by anyone who cares about the art of fiction.” When I read this so compiling blurb of this story book, I couldn’t choose any other author or a book for my Letter P of this 2018 April A to Z challenge. Every day we see the same emotions of idleness, ambition, frustration, love and lust all around us. This connection is an influencing factor for me to read anything. I am looking forward to reading this book as soon as I can.

Buy this book on Amazon

Paperback: 288 pages
Publisher: Penguin UK (28 November 2006)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0141029021
ISBN-13: 978-0141029023

Adding this to the amazing bucket of blogs at #BlogchatterA2Z.