The Devil I Know

From the award-winning Irish novelist comes this "savagely comic . . . dark, surreal" satire of low morals, high finance, and Ireland's precarious property boom (The New York Times).

 


Tristram St. Lawrence hasn't been home for years. Ever since he missed his mother's deathbed to go on a bender, the thirteenth Earl of Howth isn't welcome in the family castle. Now sober, he lives in self-imposed exile and is in contact with only two confidantes. One is Desmond Hickey, a former childhood bully, and current successful developer. The other is M. Deauville, Tristram's mysterious AA sponsor to whom he is utterly beholden.


 


Then Hickey pitches an ambitious development project to Tristram. M. Deauville assures him that it's a great idea. Before Tristram knows it, he's up to his neck in funding proposals, zoning approvals, bids on property from Britain to Shanghai, and blind drunk with the euphoria of becoming a very rich man.


 


In this wry skewering of a country, a man, and today's international financial system, Kilroy "balances perfectly the comic and the monstrous . . . with an eerie believability, leaving us in a situation completely unrealistic and, for that, completely true" (The Daily Beast).