Jabberwock: (1 Dedalus Ireland)

Imagine if Flann O'Brien, with a little help from James Joyce, had rewritten Alice in Wonderland or Laurence Sterne had sent Don Quixote on a voyage alongside Lemuel Gulliver, then you have entered the world of Jabberwock - an anarchic novel full of delights and fromulous pleasures. It tells the story of Ignatius Hackett, once the toast of 1920s literary 'Dubilin' before he is undone by words and dispatched to Swift's Mental Asylum. With Europe on the brink of war, his journalistic skills are remembered and he is sent across the water to investigate a spate of verbal outrages in a topsy-turvy world in which fonts and footnotes flourish while puns and paradoxes proliferate at an alarming rate. Spurred on, he travels to France and into the dark heart of Germany, and gets caught up in a sinister chess-game of police and informers, of spies and revolutionaries behind which moves the shadowy Ouroboros Brotherhood. Who can be trusted, when words themselves are no longer content to be bound in dictionaries, but are in danger of being pressganged as wonder-weapons in the new World War? AUTHOR: Dara Kavanagh is a writer, academic, translator and poet. A native of Dublin, he spent more than a decade working in Africa, Australia and Latin America before returning to settle in Ireland. He is the author of several books and poetry collections. Dedalus has published his 2 novels Prague 1938 (2021) and Jabberwock (2023).

About the Author :
Dara Kavanagh is a writer, academic, translator and poet. A native of Dublin, he spent more than a decade working in Africa, Australia and Latin America before returning to settle in Ireland. He is the author of several books and poetry collections. Dedalus has published his 2 novels Prague 1938 and Jabberwock.

Review :
"JABBERWOCK fizzes with wit and ingenuity -- a linguistic riot of hiberno-anarchy." -Ronan Hession, author of Leonard and Hungry Paul. 'Set in a parallel reality roughly a quark's breadth from our own, Jabberwock is a laugh-out-loud love letter to language itself, and arguably the greatest treasure trove of terrible literary puns ever published." -Declan Burke in The Irish Times "Kavanagh holds a mirror up to the present day and steadily (if a little crazily) reflects back our own anxieties around language. The magic of creating words, supplementing language, and the mayhem of trying to control this process is masterfully captured in this brilliantly zany novel." -Kevin Curran in Books Ireland "Kavanagh's subject is historical, his influences canonical, his title Carrollian, and yet he speaks - or, more aptly, babbles - to an era of fake news and digital rabbit holes. Language proves an unwieldy yet hilarious Wunderwaffe in this madcap novel, its meanings - delightfully, perilously - never fully in our control." -Thomas Gilhooly in The Literary Review "The ingenious plot hinges on the idea that words can take on a physical form (as they did to Carroll's Humpty Dumpty) and then be weaponized, their original meaning altered or lost entirely. The story unfolds in a parallel version of the late 1930s, when, with Europe on the brink of war." -David Collard in The Times Literary Supplement