BOOK REVIEW 

Reprinted from the September 2026 issue of RELATED☘️ magazine, for Brigid’s Library and Irish by Ancestry members and friends 

PRESTIGE DRAMA, by Séamas O’Reilly (Cardinal/Hatchette, 2026) 

By SHELAGH BRALEY STARR
RELATED ☘️ Staff

Prestige Drama by Séamas O’Reilly is a wry, witty, deeply reflective Irish mystery that explores grief and history intertwined, the stories people tell about themselves, and the confessions that give them away. 

Known for his sharp humor and political insight, O’Reilly blends experience growing up during the Troubles in Derry, Northern Ireland, with culturally strong characters that defy stereotype, creating a story that feels intimate and insightful. 

The drama in Prestige Drama centers on a community where (nearly failed) writer Diarmuid Walsh returns home with a TV contract for a script about a Troubles-era local massacre. The other 12 points of view provide the background of poor Jamie Devenney’s death as well as varying perspectives on how, when, and whether such a thing should be memorialized—by an American starlet, no less. 

Read the rest of the review in the September 1 RELATED☘️ magazine—HERE

This review is bonus content for Brigid’s Library Book Club

PIRANESI, by Susanna Clarke (Bloomsbury, September 2020)

**Winner of the 2021 Women’s Prize for Fiction, shortlisted for 2021 Costa Novel Award and the Waterstones Book of the Year

By SHELAGH BRALEY STARR

Brigid’s Library

When someone recommended PIRANESI to me, their input made picking it up inevitable: “Go into it knowing nothing.” 

I was in for a surprise, one I couldn’t resist. (I am so glad I followed advice for once.) 

This curious, award-winning fantasy emerged a little at a time, like a coastline beyond the fog, with a thick layer of preponderances to wade through. But that is the beauty of Piranesi: Once the pieces start to click, the urgency gathers momentum, and you read faster and faster, because you feel it, you know—this revelation is coming, and you don’t want to miss the moment. I have never wanted to discover the truth of something more—and well, isn’t that the very kind of enlightenment the book’s characters are seeking?

Author Susanna Clarke builds a house full of vestibules, statues, and unruly tides, a gloriously strange setting that, out of context, feels almost made for science-fiction. Lonely Piranesi, the narrator, what is he? Surely a robot cataloging its inventory of bones. He lives in this vivid complex alone, but for one visitor, the Other, with whom he meets twice weekly. Piranesi is simple and kind—but is the Other kind in return? Is he cruel or just distracted?

The mages, artists, and academics converge to reveal the reason behind this parallel universe: the search for Great and Secret Knowledge. With that comes a series of surprises that range from gruesome to devastating. But Piranesi, in his unique view, rescues the positive from his strange existence. “The Beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite.” 

He capitalizes ordinary nouns in his chronicles, revealing the deep respect and affection he feels toward the objects in this immense, sea-battered home that have kept him safe and shown him the way to self-reliance. He fishes and culls seaweed for food, drains rain bowls for drinking water, adorns himself with treasures from the sea. When the Other gives him shoes to wear to complete a difficult task, Piranesi’s response is as fawning as Harry Potter’s Dobby and his sock. 

As readers sink into this labyrinthine world, we realize with no small amount of horror: There is more here than we understand, more here than even Piranesi understands. Thus begins a desperate chase to discover the missing details that will make right the emerging wrongs that poor Piranesi is starting to see. 

As the long-awaited follow-up to the 2004 success of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrill, British author Clarke took her time with Piranesi out of necessity, confined at times to bed with an illness that surely added to the mystery and desolation unmistakable in this novel. The gothic dread that clings to every page past Piranesi’s first journal entry crashes to a glorious conclusion, just like the tides that intersect, trapped within the house on every third Wednesday of the full moon. Such complex metaphysics and suspended disbelief are worth it in the end—but I can’t tell you any more. It’s a book I can honestly say, for one of the greatest literary joys, I wish I could read it for the first time again. 

But, like Piranesi, now I know too much.