In At Swims-Two-Birds, Flann O'Brien gave us cowboys riding through Dublin. Now, Ferdia Lennon gives us modern-day Dubliners living among the ancient Greeks. This is a very special, very clever, very entertaining novel.” This is, without a doubt, the single most important piece of #ancienthistory fiction published in the past decade (if not longer). On the island of Sicily amid the Peloponnesian War, the S An utterly original celebration of that which binds humanity across battle lines and history.

Fear not,” says I. “We come not to punish, though you Athenian dogs deserve punishment. Gelon and I are merciful. We come—” No Sophocles, nor Aeschylus, nor any other Athenian poet. You can recite them if it pleases you, but water and cheese are only for Euripides. Now, my man. What have you got?” The festival is thrilled to bring Tessa Hadley to Ennis this year, she said, a novelist of great subtlety and power. Eavan Boland and her legacy will be celebrated in an event featuring Annemarie Ní Churreáin, John O’Donnell and Olivia O’Leary. Ennis will also host top crime fiction authors Jane Casey, Liz Nugent and Catherine Ryan Howard, in conversation with Declan Hughes.

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. 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.

Syracuse is battle-scarred, orphaned children running amok, and the novel contemplates the difficulty of forgiveness in the aftermath of war and the moral complexities of imprisonment. Although the book was begun long before, it’s tempting to draw parallels with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Like Russia, says Lennon, Athens never publicly stated that its aims were imperialistic. The vanquished Athenians are being held captive in Syracusan quarries. Lampo’s best friend, Gelon, is “mad for” the Athenian tragedian Euripides, and the pair offer the starving prisoners sustenance in exchange for recitations from his plays. They then cast them in their own productions of “Medea” and “The Trojan Women”. I’m surprised to hear Lennon doesn’t have much performing experience, so vividly does he evoke the unifying power of theatre. But he does compare writing fiction to method acting, and he certainly succeeds in getting under his characters’ skins. A “deeply flawed” narrator, Lampo’s “rogue’s confession” reveals his vulnerabilities, earning your affection and trust. His gags and missteps make you laugh, roll your eyes and ultimately root for him as he falls in love and learns to fight for what he wants. 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 swift-footed Achilles it can never be! O Hellas, my father will never allow it. Achilles, what can—”

Glorious Exploits is an exhilarating and fiercely original story of brotherhood, war and art; and - in the face of the Gods' apparent indifference - of daring to dream of something bigger than ourselves. The “bridge” and Graham Gore move into a safehouse somewhere in London, where she begins the delicate process of assimilation, bringing him up to speed with developments since the Victorian age. Bradley, whose “all-time favourite writer” is Terry Pratchett, mines a rich source of comedy with this fish-out-of-water side to the charming, chain-smoking Gore. The “bridge” maintains a professional distance to begin with, but the sexual tension between the two builds slowly and inexorably. 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. Amazingly, the idea is rooted in historical record; Plutarch’s Lives references how some Athenian prisoners survived by quoting Euripides to the poetry-loving Sicilians. For Lennon, this discovery transformed a large-scale war of conquest into a personal story, and he set out to investigate the contradiction between the dehumanisation of the prisoners and the obsession with their drama, and to imagine how that empathy gap might have been bridged. The failed Sicilian Expedition of c.413BC was devastating for Athens and, due to the biased nature of our sources, we hear very little of the Syracusan side of the war. We do know that captured Athenians were held prisoner in Syracusan quarries, and were forced to recite snippets of plays (which were always performed in Athens). Ferdia Lennon has seized this remarkable anecdote, and created something truly astounding out of it. The voices of Lampo and Gelon are real. Their home, their lives, their feelings, are real. I want to pour over this book and read it again and again and again, because I haven’t come across anything quite like this in all the ancient historical fiction I have read. Lemon’s writing is empathetic and hilarious and absolutely devastating. Simply magnificent.

Lampo and Gelon are local potters, young men with no work and barely two obols to rub together. With not much to fill their time, they take to visiting the nearby quarry, where they discover prisoners who will, in desperation, recite lines from the plays of Euripides in return for scraps of bread and a scattering of olives. 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 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 ...

Fish Books

Bradley has no plans to give up the publishing day job, preferring to write in the evenings after work. Dominoes originally began as a one-woman stage show written and performed by McIntosh to have “something I could be cast in and that no one could say: ‘You’re not right for’”. In an online magazine article explaining why she penned the show, McIntosh stated: “I wrote ‘Dominoes’ when I’d started having concerns that perhaps my fair skin and blond curls, my half-Jamaican, half-English heritage—the things I’m told make me unique and interesting—were also making me too difficult for casting directors to cast and for agents to sign.” The positive audience response to the sell-out run at the 2013 Edinburgh Fringe Festival which was followed by winning a place on the Tamasha x Hachette Creative Writing Programme helped solidify McIntosh’s belief that “Dominoes” the show could become a novel.

Northern Irish fiction is thriving. Neil Hegarty will moderate a discussion with three writers, Lucy Caldwell, Olivia Fitzsimons and Michelle Gallen, whose work displays an impressive, layered and sometimes devilishly funny rendering of life in the North.what Bradley calls “the spy thriller elements” along with a darker undercurrent, and a clever twist. No spoilers here, but Bradley says, “when I was thinking about the Ministry I was thinking about the legacy of the British Empire”.