His critically-acclaimed novel, At Swim, Two Boys (2001) earned him the highest advance ever paid for an Irish novel and frequent claims that he was the natural successor to James Joyce, Flann O'Brien and Samuel Beckett. Jamie O'Neill is an Irish author, who lived and worked in England for two decades he now lives in Gortachalla, in County Galway, Ireland. Mack, who has grand plans for a corner shop empire, remains unaware of the depth of the boys’ burgeoning friendship and of the changing landscape of a nation. Out at the Forty Foot, that great jut of rock where gentlemen bathe in the nude, the two boys make a pact: Doyler will teach Jim to swim, and in a year, on Easter of 1916, they will swim to the distant beacon of Muglins Rock and claim that island for themselves.
Doyler Doyle is the rough-diamond son-revolutionary and blasphemous-of Mr. Jim Mack is a naïve young scholar and the son of a foolish, aspiring shopkeeper. Powerful and artful, and ten years in the writing, it is a masterwork from Jamie O’Neill. Set during the year preceding the Easter Uprising of 1916-Ireland’s brave but fractured revolt against British rule- At Swim, Two Boys is a tender, tragic love story and a brilliant depiction of people caught in the tide of history. Praised as “a work of wild, vaulting ambition and achievement” by Entertainment Weekly, Jamie O’Neill’s first novel invites comparison to such literary greats as James Joyce, Samuel Beckett and Charles Dickens.
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