Yeats is Dead!

“I think he was dead before I shot him.”

With these auspicious words begins a murder mystery so utterly unlike any other that it took fifteen of Ireland’s finest writers (working well below their peak) to bring it to its unlikely conclusion. The plot involves a mad search for the only manuscript of an unpublished novel by James Joyce, and features a stellar cast—including a sadistic sergeant with the unlikely name of Andy Andrews and the unforgettable mob boss Mrs. Bloom, a woman “who had tried everything but drew the line at honesty.” Raucous, raunchy, gratuitously violent and completely hilarious, Yeats Is Dead! is a diabolically entertaining mulligan stew of a novel. James Joyce would be proud.

Joseph O’Connor’s debut novel, Cowboys and Indians, was short-listed for the Whitbread Prize. His work has been widely translated and has won many prizes. He lives in Ireland.

Yeats Is Dead! is a novel written by fifteen Irish authors as a fund-raiser for Amnesty International, a worldwide grassroots movement that promotes and defends human rights. Amnesty International works independently of all government and political ideologies to: secure the release of prisoners of conscience—people detained solely because of their beliefs, identity or ethnic origin, who have neither used nor advocated violence; ensure fair and prompt trials for all political prisoners; and end all use of torture, political killings, “disappearances” and the death penalty.