Shall We Gather at the River

At its best, the book operates almost like a collection of linked short stories, and there are sections that stand alone as absorbing performances in their own right. The prose is both evocative and slippery, characterised by a kind of evasive bombas ... the effect of the book is, quite appropriately, like that of listening to a shortwave radio being flicked up and down the frequencies ... there are enough moments of poignancy and lyrical force to make tuning in a worthwhile endeavour. -- Mark O'Connell Sunday Business Post Murphy's rural Ireland feels thrillingly unpredictable, if not downright malevolent ... Murphy rightly eschews easy answers when it comes to explaining the tragedy and, at its best, his prose is as eerily hypnotic as the river of the book's title. -- Daragh Reddin Metro This tale, full of foreboding, is delivered through chapters of prose, journal entries, news reports, radio broadcasts and interviews. Add a moody mix of Irish folklore, myth, superstition, sensationalism and religious hysteria with a subtle and affecting use of language, and you have a strange and engaging novel that can easily be read in one sitting. We Love This Book Perhaps the thing that stops this from being a dull novel about the horrors of fate is that it isfunny. Ornate, even grotesque, comic episodes are a significant part of its charm ... Murphy moves into and out of various characters' voices with ease and grace ... wonderful portrayals of how we try to re-narrate ourselves and our lives, even if our new stories don't last long enough. -- Aime Williams Spectator The myth and mist-soaked cloth of his work is woven through with a distinctly gothic rhythm and rhyme, a tautness of telling and ear for phrase. Shall We Gather at the River? - the title comes from a Victorian hymn - grabs you with this cocktail on the very first page and doesn't let go until the wild ride is over... a pummeling, relentless prose-track of fire, brimstone, black comedy and rock'n'roll. Caught by the River Peter Murphy can write like an angel. Well, like a bad angel - a clarification he'd probably prefer. His gaze is mischievous, and he delights in words and can nail things and people with incisive descriptions that can be startling or funny but are always lucid. He has a showman's zest for the flamboyant, the baroque, the subverted cliche and lyrical phrase. Echoes of other writers - Pat McCabe, Angela Carter, Flannery O'Connor, Samuel Beckett - reveal his good taste. And he has a gift that is much rarer in writers than it should be: a sense of rhythm, a feel for the way sentences follow each other to carry the reader with them. Murphy is also a musician, and it shows. -- Anne Haverty Irish Times We need more books like this, I thoroughly enjoyed this ... the Irish novel needs more of this type of book ... a triumph -- Declan Burke RTE 'Arena' His two startling novels, John the Revelator, and now the even more terse and unflinchingly all-consuming Shall We Gather at the River - the former suggestive in its title of the Book of Revelation, the second evocative of a stirring Christian anthem - are books of hyperbole, of thunderbolt, neither readily forgotten -- Tom Adair The Scotsman A ripping yarn ... Murphy rattles a genre's pots and pans with passion and poetry. -- Donal O'Donoghue RTE Guide [Murphy] writes well about the voodoo effect of music, and the way that songs and stories can invade our dreams ... his Southern Gothic style - a cross between Flannery O'Connor and Flann O'Brien - is peculiarly well suited to depicting the small-town madness of 1980s Ireland ... an ambitious eco-fantasy by a talented stylist. -- Keith Hopper Times Literary Supplement Beautifully wrought prose ... Murphy has created a haunting fable about death and the sins of the father, that will live on in your memory. -- Stav Sherez Catholic Herald 'Murphy is a writer with a wicked imagination. His highly stylised brand of gothic prose serves up a treat of gruesome, eschatological images that are equally disturbing and amusing simultaneously.' -- JP O'Malley Sunday Independent