Prestige Drama

Prestige Drama is a hilarious and profound novel. Seamas O'Reilly has an acute ear for the rhythms of real speech, and for the lies we tell ourselves

Ed Caesar

Séamas O'Reilly has created a vast mosaic of voices, each sparkling with heartache and wit. I'm in love with every character in this novel, and like most prestige dramas, it ended far too soon.

Everyone's going to talk about how funny Prestige Drama is. That's a no brainer. But behind every brilliant line is shimmering humanity, and a deeply satisfying investigation into one of fiction's biggest questions. Does taking your broken heart and making it into art actually work, or just lead to the creation of more broken hearts?

Séamas O'Reilly is very good

Caroline O'Donoghue

A tragicomic portrait of a community . . . vital, soulful, reflective, battle-scarred, comic, and/or profane . . . A virtuoso chorus of community experience gives voice to undead trauma

Kirkus

There is hilarity and pathos on every page. Utterly engaging and authentic, Prestige Drama says so much about Derry and its people, about Irish culture and its pathologies, and about the challenges and necessity of storytelling in a heavily storied place

Caoilinn Hughes

In this kaleidoscopic rendering of the case of a missing film star, Séamas O'Reilly manages to convey all the grief, humour, charm of the people Derry City through the colourful voices of its inhabitants. He is a natural storyteller, writing in vivid, beautifully articulated sentences. Séamas understands deeply the conjoinment of pain and humour in the Irish psyche. I howled with laughter in parts. But the pain lies between the lines, buried beneath the surface of small talk and gossip. This is where Séamas is best, at rendering the complex contradictions of a modern city which can't escape the ghosts of its past

Annie Mac

Disarmingly hilarious

Sunday Times

Rollicking . . . caustic, withering and genuinely funny

Independent, May Books of the Month

Every bit as darkly funny as you might expect

iPaper, May Books of the Month

Funny and tragic

TLS

Impressive . . . This tragicomic set piece deftly encapsulates one of the novel's observations: that Derry is defined by its recent history even as it tries desperately to outgrow it

Literary Review

Viciously and hilariously astute . . . A riotous mixture of raucous humour, burning sarcasm, genuine empathy and real sadness

Irish Independent

I couldn't be looking forward to it more

Irish Independent, Books to Look Out for in 2026

A coal black portrait of a struggling community

RTE Guide, Ones to Watch in 2026

O'Reilly is a startlingly perceptive writer, capturing with acuity the rogue characters, rifts, gripes and festering resentments that make up this motley community

Spectator

The Hollywood-ification of Northern Ireland and the rise of Troubles tourism is brilliantly and bitterly rendered in this very funny book. O'Reilly - a Derry native and regular writer for The Observer magazine, whose memoir Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? was similarly uninterested in sentimentality - has a gift for capturing strange behaviour and the comedy in all of our ugly humanity

Observer

It's the voices of the local bit-part players who narrate that make this such an entertaining read. Furious, cynical, satirical and opportunistic, they consistently challenge the platitudes and cliches in which their recent past is now packaged

Daily Mail