Bestselling Irish writer Paul Howard will be at Kennys Bookshop on September 2nd, to talk about about his new satire A Nation Once Again.

Tickets for this event are free but are limited, and you can book below.

Paul Howard is a journalist, author and comedy writer best known as the creator of the No 1 bestselling Ross O’Carroll-Kelly series. He has won a record four Irish Book Awards and is a former Irish Sports Journalist of the Year and Irish Newspaper Columnist of the Year.

About A Nation Once Again:
There’s only one idea more foolish than dividing Ireland – and that’s trying to put it back together again.

Meet Fiach O’Bric: career diplomat, recent widower, and a man looking forward to a peaceful retirement. But just when he thinks he’s out, he is strong-armed into taking over a shadowy top-secret department tasked with preparing for a United Ireland — a job so surreal it makes his last posting, in Beijing, seem like a Buddhist retreat.

Running the Department with Responsibility for Making Arrangements for the Unification of Ireland, an outfit quietly failing since 1958, Fiach finds himself managing a team of oddballs, timeservers, and a die-hard nationalist from Dundalk. And he spends his days refereeing rows about everything everyone has failed to agree for about 800 years, as well as absurd new suggestions – like conjuring a capital city that nobody actually wants. In Westmeath. Nothing is too crazy to be proposed, nor too sensible to be rejected.

Fiach can feel the hand of history on his shoulder. He suspects it may soon throttle him.

Yet, against his better judgement — and all available evidence — a dangerous thought takes hold. What if he could be the one to do what Tone, Pearse and centuries of Irish martyrs failed to do: make Ireland one, and somehow not die in the process.

Copies of A Nation Once Again are available to pre-order here. Copies will also be available to buy at the event.

If you have any questions on this event or would like to be notified of other events at Kennys Bookshop, please email martha@kennys.ie.