Cameo

The new novel from Irish Book Award-shortlisted author Rob Doyle: a daring comedy and dazzling meditation on fiction and reality'Like Swift before him, Rob Doyle is a social satirist of the highest order . . . Cameo is provocative, transgressive, grimly hilarious, and it surely can't be long until he spawns his own adjective. 'Doylean'? Don't rule it out' BENJAMIN MYERS'Where I come from, when something is called mad it's often a good thing. Rob Doyle's new novel is very mad' RODDY DOYLE'A writer living and thinking his way to the frontiers of human society' SPECTATORCameo is the life story of invented Irish novelist Ren Duka, who has unexpected, runaway international success with a prolific series of autofictional novels.What begins as a playful satire on literary ambition and the chaos of our times expands into a dazzling, polyphonic odyssey that challenges the border between fiction and reality.As the Ren Duka novels race outwards in widening circles of influence, we encounter Dina Tatangelo, cult novelist of the New York underworld; a Japanese manga artist whose work eerily affects his family life; a grizzled Dublin taxi driver who just might ferry his passengers between worlds; a film-star facing public disgrace; and Rob Doyle, an author enduring a psychic and ontological crisis.Cameo is at once a metaphysical architecture of the imagination, a human comedy full of unruly passions, and a self-portrait across multiple dimensions.PRAISE FOR THRESHOLD'Doyle is a Romantic wandering in the post-sublime, a zealot without a cause' CHRIS POWER'If this blurb were a movie title it would go like this: Threshold, or, how I learned to stop worrying (about what sort of novel this is) and love the narrator, whose brilliance and humour on drugs and literature, sex and boredom and death, leave me in awe' RACHEL KUSHNER'Audacious, daring and deranged, endlessly entertaining, furiously funny and - to hurtle to the other end of the alphabet - wonderful' GEOFF DYER'This is the kind of brilliant, maverick achievement that sets a writer apart' MIKE MCCORMACK'One of the most original and intelligent writers at work today' DONAL RYAN'Game and gleefully provocative' NEW YORK TIMES'Riddling, irreverent, fearless' TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT