Publishers Weekly
★ 06/06/2022
Scottish author O’Connor delivers a searing and passionate debut from the voice of an angsty young Glaswegian who squats in a mostly abandoned high rise he calls “the voids.” The unnamed narrator is dejected after a breakup and newly unemployed, and fills his depressed days by aimlessly wandering the city’s underbelly. He goes to bars, trips on LSD, meets girls, and commiserates with the broken and downtrodden. As his life devolves into chaos, one highlight is when he steals a bag of cocaine from a gangster on a rainy night that ends in disappointment and desperation. Despite the despair and depravity that suffuses the narrator’s Glasgow, he exudes a fierce, glowing vitality, describing snowmelt from rooftops as “the tears of a city” and a mountain range he once saw in Italy as “lifted straight out of the mind of God.” Through his suffering and the madness of his lifestyle, he accumulates a treasure-trove of dazzling, almost saintly insights into human nature, noting, for instance, that regret imbues people with “the loneliness of an empty church.” Readers will be lifted by his protagonist’s commitment to finding beauty in the darkness. (Aug.)
From the Publisher
Scottish author O’Connor delivers a searing and passionate debut from the voice of an angsty young Glaswegian who squats in a mostly abandoned high rise he calls “the voids.” … Readers will be lifted by his protagonist’s commitment to finding beauty in the darkness.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred review
“Compelling and well-written … The episodic darkness can be unrelenting at times, but what redeems the material is not only O’Connor’s effortless prose but also his hope for humanity rooted in his surprising optimism.”
—June Sawyers, Booklist
“Ryan O'Connor's superb debut treads familiar territory within Scottish fiction, such as Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting and Douglas Stuart's Shuggie Bain, it is lyrical and poetic, humorous and heartbreaking, unnerving and disorientating … Simply brilliant, and highly recommended.”
—Jeremy Delgado
“It is rare to discover a book that is simultaneously beautiful and devastating, where characters are frightening to behold but also worthy of compassion.”
—Simon Van Booy, author of Night Came with Many Stars
“The Voids is a wild, magical, and magnetically mad picaresque … it had me bellowing with laughter on one page and needing to weep on the next. I tore through it, and it through me. A brilliant debut.”
—Niall Griffiths, author of Sheepshagger and Broken Ghost
“Reading The Voids is a sensory experience. There is never a word too much, it never lingers. There is tragedy but no melodrama. O’Connor’s lightness of touch, the pace, economy, characters… are all perfect, all harmonious, poetic, but unadorned, even in the blackest of moments. Part of me is still in that high rise or watching the sunlight through the fire exit door at The Satellite. It is beautiful and perfect. I want to say this is a book God would like.”
—Paul Buchanan, The Blue Nile
“This distinctive debut leaves you wanting to read more from O’Connor.”
—Anthony Cummins, The Daily Mail
“Finely written … O’Connor creates a world ex nihilo, showcasing the lives of the forgotten.”
—The Irish Times
“An unflinching yet poetic portrait of addiction, this bleak tale is leavened by glimmers of hope and humor.”
—Dan Shaw, Happy Mag
“The prose in Scottish newcomer Ryan O’Connor’s The Voids soars higher than the condemned Glasgow skyscraper in which his solitary protagonist lives, transcending the grungy, grinding plot with brutal lyricism.”
—Michael Winkler, Australian Book Review's Books of the Year 2022
