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Good Trouble

  • Author Joseph O'Neill
  • Narrator various
  • Publisher HarperCollins Publishers
  • Run Time 5 hours and 8 minutes
  • Format x-book®
  • Genre Short stories.
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What to expect

Back at dinner, somebody said that the goose thinks it’s a dog. No, it doesn’t. It doesn’t think it’s a dog. The goose doesn’t think. The goose just is. And what the goose is is goose. But goose is not goose, Robert thinks. Even the goose isn’t goose.

In Good Trouble, the first story collection from Joseph O’Neill, author of Netherland, characters are forced to discover exactly who they are, and who they can never quite be.

There’s Rob, who swears he is a dependable member of society, but can’t scrape together a character reference to prove that’s the case. And Jayne, who has no choice but to investigate a strange noise downstairs while her husband lies glued to the bed with fear. A mother tries to find where she fits into her son’s new life of semi-soft rind-washed cheeses, and a poet tries to fathom what makes a poet. Do you even have to write poetry?

Packed with O’Neill’s trademark acerbic humour, Good Trouble explores the maddening and secretly political space between thoughts and deeds, between men and women, between goose and not-goose.

Critics Review

  • Praise for Good Trouble:

    ‘Most short-story collections are the proverbial mixed bag … Good Trouble – wonderfully – is an exception. These stories are the work of a highly original mind. They give enormous pleasure’ Literary Review

    ‘O’Neill’s intelligence and invention puts him ahead of the pack’ Sunday Times

    Praise for Netherland:

    ‘A great American novel, but one with an ordinary European Everyman at its centre.’ Sean O’Hagan, Observer

    ‘An exquisitely written novel, a large fictional achievement, and one of the most remarkable post-colonial books I have ever read’ James Wood, New Yorker

    ‘An extraordinary novel … O’Neill is a writer of dizzying elegance’ Daniel Swift, Financial Times

    ‘Touched by greatness’ Ed Caesar, Sunday Times

    ‘It is hard to know which is stranger – that a great American novel has been written about cricket or that a great cricket novel should be set in America. But both are true. Netherland, a state-of-the-nation exploration of contemporary America, is ambitious, intelligent and deeply perceptive…whether a huge six or a home run – whatever the metaphor of your choice Netherland – comes right out of the middle of the bat’ Ed Smith, The Times

    Praise for The Dog:

    ‘On page after page, O’Neill can still dazzle as a compellingly intelligent writer. Everywhere you look, there’s a shimmering portrait of modernity waiting to be glimpsed … [An] ambitious, lucidly thought-through novel’ Guardian

    ‘Our only truly international writer … Breathtaking … O’Neill’s writing reflects the individual’s concerns in our desolate modern world in prose that is illuminating, amusing, sometimes beautiful, but never showy’ Irish Independent

    ‘The best comic novel I’ve read for ages’ The Scotsman

    ‘Enraged, brutal, witty and at times brilliant’ Sunday Times

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