Cameo

'Masterful' FINANCIAL TIMES

'Genuinely ingenious . . . In this novel he's simultaneously surmounted and retired a genre' NEW STATESMAN

'There simply isn't another novelist writing with such personality, ingenuity and purpose' SUNDAY INDEPENDENT

'A fantasy of literary celebrity in the culture war era . . . generates terrific momentum and the satire is wicked' GUARDIAN


The new novel from Irish Book Award-shortlisted author Rob Doyle: a daring comedy and dazzling meditation on fiction and reality

Cameo 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.


'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

'Curious, compassionate, filthy, iconoclastic . . . Cameo is mindbending fun' LISA McINERNEY

'A heady cocktail . . . genuinely scintillating' MAIL ON SUNDAY

'Buckle up' DAILY MAIL