Leannán Sidhe: The Irish Muse

This intriguing collection of stories puts an original twist on foreign and familiar territory. Merging the passion and wit of Irish storytelling with the down-to-earth flavour of contemporary New Zealand, these stories include:

• a ringmaster’s daughter who is too implausible to be true — despite all the evidence to the contrary
• an ageing nightclub gigolo in one last desperate bid to best a younger rival
• a Wellington consultant whose uncomplicated affair with a public service colleague proves anything but
• an Irish career woman in London stalked by a mysterious figure from her past
• a sleep-deprived translator struggling to make sense of bizarre events in a French city.

‘Leannán Sidhe (pronounced Lan-awn Shee) is an otherworld creature in Irish folklore; a muse that accepts a lover’s affection in return for the ability to create a work of art of immense feeling.

Wairarapa Times Age

In this writers’ first collection of short stories there’s a strong painterly way with words that takes you to the places and situations. Snatched moments of lust and surges of romantic pain and bereavements abound as do chilly nights, lonely wanderings, jaded machinations, tawdry affairs, Kafkaesque frustrations and grim humour.

I appreciated many of his descriptions, mist through a train window and the way foggy days and nights can transport you into another kind of reality. The last story, Morris Dancing, is a neat twist on our supposedly benign colonisation process (no Union Jacks on London bridge, pai kare!) and is a fine ending to the author’s fine beginning.

The Wellingtonian

There’s nothing quite like a good short story. Something that pulls you in, churns your mind around and spits you out the other end … thinking about what you’ve just read. Brian O’Sullivan offers 13 yarns in his first book The Irish Muse and Other Stories. Overall he achieves that feeling. Most of his stories left me wondering about the characters, their lives and experiences. 

It’s fiction tinged with a bit of real life experience, set in Wellington, Ireland and France amongst other places. The stories range from chance romantic encounters in a small Irish town and haunting tales of tragic personal loss to bizarre encounters between a consultant and a career woman in Wellington and one man’s attempt to get to the bottom of his internet service woes. The finale was a thought-provoking tale that upended my perception of indigenous people’s land grievances, oddly entitled ‘Morris Dancing’. My favourite is Sleepwalking in English, a story about a man’s attempts to come to grips with the death of his partner in a car crash – the ending was strikingly eerie.

It’s a simply written, easy to read book that you can devour in a night if the mood takes you. It’s said that you can’t judge a book by its cover. Au contraire, I liked the look of O’Sullivan’s book and the content proved to be good.

Otago Daily Times 

A delightful book of short stories set both in Ireland and New Zealand, these are a mixture of tender whimsy and sharp irony, in a
collection that will delight. My favourites included 'Morris Dancing' which is a translation of the papers of the Maori rulers of New Aotearoa with the Parliament sitting in Westminster, London. In that same satirical vein I enjoyed 'The Morning After' in which a couple wake up after a terribly debauched night unable to remember how they got to Paris or who they are. It has a fabulous punch line.

Less Ironic is the title story 'Leannán Sidhe', which is a sprawling tale about a composer with writer’s block and a flautist in a small Irish village. It plays all the clichés of Ireland with a modern tone that interweaves the magical and realistic in a wonderful, whimsical mix.