“Skewering the international financial system, with its rampant corruption and irrational exuberance, is familiar literary fodder. Yet in her savagely comic fourth novel, the Irish author Claire Kilroy does it with fresh energy, diving into the heady boom era known as the Celtic Tiger and its ignominious collapse. . . . Great fun.” —Carmela Ciuraru, The New York Times
“This young Irish writer packs a stunning worldly wisdom into her beautiful prose.” —Barbara Kingsolver, author of Flight Behavior
“A darkly hilarious fable about the Irish economic boom and its implosion . . . [I was] deeply impressed by its taut storytelling and elegant style. Kilroy manages to combine ancient motifs—the Faustian bargain, even hints of a vampire lineage—with the most accurate satire of nouveau riche property developers and crooked politicians. She scores bull’s eyes in every paragraph.” —Emma Donoghue, author of Room, in Chatelaine (Canada)
“A brilliant satire of Ireland’s boom and bust . . .The echo of [Myles na Gopaleen’s] mad genius is still recognizable in Claire Kilroy’s dark and fantastical comedy, The Devil I Know. . . . The greed and rampaging ambition of such avatars of ‘the new Ireland’ as Hickey are boundless and grotesquely funny. . . . Beyond the brilliantly phantasmagorical aspects of the novel, the dialog perfectly captures a Dublin manner of speech, the syntax and bullshittery. . . . The physical descriptions and their conceits are ingenious and of a distinctly Irish strain.” —Katherine A. Powers, The Arts Fuse
“Dark, funny and wonderful . . . A shot through the heart of the Irish boom.” —Anne Enright, Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Gathering
“Kilroy . . . finds in satire a medium capacious enough to allow her imagination its fullest sprawl. The plates of her plot spin ever more feverishly towards absurd calamity, but she balances perfectly the comic and the monstrous. . . . Just as impressive are the ways in which Kilroy weaves her fiction with the more outlandish realities of the Tiger years. . . . That is Kilroy’s knack here: the combination of the believable fiction with the unbelievable fact. Again and again, the documented past lends itself more than willingly to the service of the hyper-real, so that by the time the plot kicks into inevitable gothic overdrive it does so with an eerie believability, leaving us in a situation completely unrealistic and, for that, completely true.” —Andrew Fox, The Daily Beast
“The Devil I Know is smart, funny and stylish, and bang up to the minute. Reading it, one squirms in appalled recognition of the extremes of greed and foolishness of our time, which Claire Kilroy portrays with devilish accuracy.” —John Banville, author of the Man Booker Prize-winning novel The Sea and Ancient Light
“Kilroy’s darkly comic caper draws the reader in immediately. . . Both a cautionary tale and a stylish satire, this is a diverting read.” —Publishers Weekly
“Cryptic and exuberant and angry and allegorical and satirical all at once . . . Kilroy’s darkly comic, clever novel keeps the reader engrossed and aghast, as chaos is piled on top of crisis, fortunes are made and lost in a trice, and the Irish madness of the times runs its course.” —Patricia Craig, The Independent (UK)
“In this carnivalesque allegory of Ireland’s property boom, Claire Kilroy presents a satiric danse macabre of brio and linguistic virtuosity. . . . Taps into the darkness of the finest Irish satire.” —Stevie Davies, The Guardian (UK)
“Claire Kilroy is brave—and talented—enough to take a fictional stab at portraying the kind of Ireland that created and destroyed the Celtic Tiger. . . . Put[s] one in mind of Patrick McCabe’s black comedies. . . . The Devil I Know is well written and fun.” —Vincent Boland, Financial Times (UK)
“A cautionary tale of greed and hubris set in Ireland at the height of the ‘Celtic Tiger’ boom.” —Shelf Awareness
“A perversely entertaining show of how easily men are corrupted by wealth . . . [Kilroy’s] prose flows irresistibly from page to page . . . A pleasure to read.” —Nick Brodie, Time Out (UK)
“In crisp prose and a cleverly structured narrative, Kilroy casts a sharply satiric eye on international finance gone awry. Smart fiction based on fact.” —Michele Leber, Booklist
“Kilroy takes delight in literary allusions and diabolical puns, but despite the humor there’s real fury in her portrayal of the casual greed, corruption and willful delusion that pervaded society “like the pox”, creating a belief in a kind of modern alchemy.” —Amber Pearson, Daily Mail (UK)
“The Devil I Know is about as black a depiction of Ireland in its crazed Celtic Tiger heyday as you could imagine. Feelingly, elegantly written, it exerts the ever-tightening grip of a thriller. . . . An elegy to an Ireland despoiled and betrayed by those who led it into financial ruin, it is also a cautionary tale of the depths to which unbridled greed can take you . . . [with] the frisson and magnetic force of a compelling and dangerously unreliable narrator. . . . [A] searing, savage novel. Kilroy . . . is flinty sharp in her observations about her country and those who sold it short.” —Rosemary Goring, Herald Scotland (UK)
“The Devil I Know focuses on the Irish property boom (and bust) and is, therefore, a tale of our time: a story of lavish greed and selfishness; soullessness and economic devastation. . . . It would be deeply depressing without Claire Kilroy’s joyously mad prose. Her writing hops over the darkness in lively, lyrical, sometimes vitriolic leaps.” —Lucy Atkins, Sunday Times (UK)
“A well paced and well told cautionary tale, a page-turner with lots of droll moments as the author skewers the moral mindset that both created the Celtic Tiger and then brought it to its knees.” —John Boland, Irish Independent (UK)
“Kilroy’s almost exclusively male cast is well-etched, and she has a dead eye for shriveling detail and truth-telling.” —Christina Hunt Mahony, Irish Times (UK)
“The Devil I Know is a public novel, even a political novel, about how Ireland went from hyperventilating affluence to agog beggary . . . Kilroy provides some of the most stunningly sly and wry writing being offered at the moment. One moment she is lyrical . . . The next she is brilliantly satirical.” —Stuart Kelly, Scotland on Sunday (UK)
“One of Ireland’s best young novelists . . . Ambitious, satirical and Gothic.” —Sue Leonard, Irish Examiner (UK)
Black Cat
