The Little Red Chairs

'This is a spectacular piece of work, massive and ferocious and far-reaching, yet also at times excruciatingly, almost unbearably, intimate,’ - Julie Myserson, The Guardian

O’Brien was 85 when this novel was published, and had been writing books for 50 years, yet as Julie Myerson marvels, ‘this is absolutely the work of a writer in her prime and at the very height of her phenomenal powers.’

Its title derives from the 2012 installation in Sarajevo of 11,541 red chairs to represent the victims of the siege that took place there – the smaller 600 of which stood for those children who perished – although the book’s key victim, Fidelma, suffers in subtler ways than they.

O’Brien’s tale was inspired by Radovan Kardzic (and was published just as he was condemned to 40 years’ incarceration for genocide), and the book opens with the arrival in a small Irish town of handsome ‘holistic healer’ (or, rather, sex therapist) Dr. Vladimir Dragan.

What seems at first a sort of charming BBC village comedy then reveals itself, piecemeal, to be a tale of horror, as glimpses of the monster that Vlad truly is are revealed through his affair with lonely, childless Fidelma.