Praise for Billy O'Callaghan

"A welcome voice to the pantheon of new Irish writing."
--Edna O'Brien

"Billy O'Callaghan's work is at once subtle and direct, warm and clear-eyed, and never less than beautifully written. He has a moving ability to express the hopes and fears of 'ordinary' people, and he knows intimately the ways of the world. This writer is the real thing."
--John Banville

"I know of no writer on either side of the Atlantic who is better at exploring the human spirit under assault than Billy O'Callaghan."
--Robert Olen Butler

"Billy O'Callaghan's writing is a profound, uncommon blend of grit and beauty, with sentences that, like his characters, are simultaneously sparse and infinitely rich."
--Simon Van Booy

"Billy O'Callaghan uses a trio of voices in his poignant novel Life Sentences as three generations of an Irish family probe a legacy of poverty and war. ....powerful."
--New York Times

"O'Callaghan has done a brilliant job of capturing the ethos of the Irish setting as we see it through the beautifully created lives of his characters, who are extraordinary, as is this timeless book about them."
--Booklist (starred review)

"O'Callaghan writes with a bright, enlivening emotional palette and a penetrating eye for the details of family history. A deeply felt and distinctive work by a real craftsman."
--Kirkus (starred review)

"Inspired by stories from his own family history, O'Callaghan delivers a slim novel that is thick with memory and regret. The hard lives of the Martins leave readers with an indelible impression of Irish history."
--Publishers Weekly

"Life Sentences is aptly named, because the novel is as involved with the rhetoric of people's personal stories as it is with the Hand of Fate's pointed finger--whether that comes in the form of Mother Church, or war, or by what still remains, sadly, the ongoing war over women's rights, and their bodies. Billy O'Callaghan is a new writer to me, and I'm happy to have made the discovery."
--Ann Beattie

"Billy O'Callaghan has long been one of my favorite writers; his way with a short story being no less than masterful. Also a splendid novelist, he now has returned to the novel and brought his remarkable narrative skills to a work of downright epic scope, making that special form utterly his own. Life Sentences is an enthralling book by a world treasure of a writer."
--Robert Olen Butler, Pulitzer Prize winning author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain

"O'Callaghan is one of our finest writers and this is his best work yet."
--John Banville

"Life Sentences tightens Billy O'Callaghan's claim to a permanent place in Irish fiction. The humanity and authentic grace of his characters are upheld by a keen ear for the Munster lexicons of grievous love. There are paragraphs of surpassing power, able to break and bind the heart at once."
--Thomas Lynch, author of The Undertaking

"His prose is a feast after a famine... Invariably delightful."
--Irish Times

"The reader is invested from the start . . . So poetically elegant as to be breathtaking . . . writing at its finest."
--New York Journal of Books

"His prose is a feast after a famine... Invariably delightful."
--Irish Times