Ghosts and Lightning is a powerful novel and Trevor Byrne is a very powerful writer. The narrator, Denny, and the others around him are great characters, often funny, sometimes frightening, always very human. I loved it. -- RODDY DOYLE
This is an amazing book, written with force and passion. And Denny is a very funny and slightly demented tour guide to twenty-first century Dublin. A gripping and dark ride to the mad side of town, Ghosts and Lightning marks Byrne as a writer to get hooked on. -- MATT HAIG
Ghosts and Lightning is engaging and funny. Trevor Byrne delivers an acute portrayal of loss in a story filled with warmth, humour and wonder. -- CATHERINE O'FLYNN, author of What Was Lost
Byrne's voice crackles with energy and dark humour in a richly-evoked novel of Dublin family life. * * Irish Independent * *
Byrne is depicting a similar kind of urban underclass to the one Roddy Doyle has written about, with the same humour and attention to detail...Also in common with Doyle, Byrne does it without being patronizing or pitying. * * Scottish Review of Books * *
Funny and entertaining, yet tinged with sadness and desperation . . . there is much to applaud in Byrne's powerful debut. His writing is concise and unfussy, yet not without literary flourishes . . . Judging by this poignant, compelling and often deeply comic tale of life on the margins of Irish society, Byrne seems certain to enjoy greater longevity than the Celtic tiger. * * Sunday Business Post * *
Lurching, wisecracking, poignant and drunken . . . engaging, exhuberant, hilarious . . . Fans of Roddy Doyle will be agreeably entertained, while the semantically minded may be inclined to marvel at the numerous variations on the word fuck. -- Catherine Taylor * * Guardian * *
Trevor Byrne's first novel looks like the Irish debut we have been waiting for, a novel which could fill out our incomplete literary map of Ireland and allow southwest Dublin to take its place alongside Toibin's Enniscorthy, McCabe's Monaghan or Doyle's Northside. -- Barry McRea * * Irish Times * *