After fleeing his dying parents and the drudgery of work in Dublin for the Manhattan of his imagination — a place of romance and opulence, dark old concert halls and mellow front parlours quieted by the hiss of the phonograph cylinder — Rickard Velily hopes to be reborn as an Irish tenor, and to one day be reunited with the love of his life. At the very peculiar Cha Bum Kun Club, a masonic-style refuge for immigrants who can’t quite cut it in New York City, he meets Denny Kennedy-Logan and Clive Sullis, and a plan is enacted: to revive the art songs and ballads of another time for a hip young city in thrall to technology and money. But that is without reckoning on meddlesome sprites, the phantoms of the past — and more malign forces who plot to subjugate the human race. Gavin Corbett's new novel Green Glowing Skull is a half-crazed brain-shunt of a trip around the dream world, the spirit world, the cyber world and a woozily recognisable real world. A darkly comic tale of mythologies, machines and the metaphysical swirl, it’s a decent third effort from Corbett that, with a fair wind and a bit of mercy shown towards it, and all other things being equal, will pick up some good reviews and find some kindly readers. Sure, all you can do is hope

From a startling new voice in Irish fiction, a mesmerizing tale of a young man on the run in Dublin. Anthony Sonaghan is hiding out in an old tenement house in Dublin: he fears he has reignited an ancient feud between the two halves of his family. Twenty-first-century Dublin may have shopping malls and foreign exchange students, but Anthony is from an Irish Travelling community, where blood ties are bound deeply to the past. When his roguish uncle Arthur shows up on his doorstep with a missing toe, delirious and apparently on the run, history and its troubles are following close behind him-and Anthony will soon have to face the question of who he really is. In prose of exceptional vividness, Gavin Corbett brings us a narrator with the power to build a new, previously unimagined world. His language, shot through with dreams and myths, summons a vision of Ireland in which a premodern spirit has somehow persisted into contemporary life, brooding and overlooked. Funny, terrible, unsettling, fiercely unsentimental, This Is the Way is haunted by some of Ireland's greatest writers even as it breaks new ground and asks afresh why the imagination is so necessary to survival