The Naming of the Birds

The Naming of the Birds is something very special: meaty, dark, exuberant, full of complicated people doing difficult things in terrible circumstances, and gesturing mutely towards love. I recommend it to both those who love Victorian Gothic, and those who usually run a mile from anything described as that but enjoy having their preconceptions confounded – Jon McGregor
The intrigue of a Conan Doyle, the terror of a Poe and the wit of an Oscar Wilde, all wrapped up in a delicious Victorian detective drama – Mat Osman
Splendid. Brimming with energy, the plot unfolds at a cracking pace. From the unsettling opening scenes to the dizzying acrobatics of the climax, Paraic O’Donnell tells his tale with the same exuberance displayed by his murderer who separates bodies from souls with a quite devastating flair – Diane Setterfield
A companion to Paraic O’Donnell’s 2018 gothic mystery The House on Vesper Sands, The Naming of the Birds unfolds with rising tension and expert pacing … O’Donnell’s virtuosic style, a mashup of Henry James and Frankie Boyle, is worth the admission price alone * Guardian *
A stylish historical thriller from a writer of brio and wit * RTÉ, ‘Fiction Highlights’ *
Brilliantly compelling … The period detail is perfectly evoked, the dialogue crackling with wit * Irish Times *
The return of the deliciously irascible Inspector Henry Cutter, star turn of The House on Vesper Sands * Irish Times, ‘Books to Look Out For in 2025’ *
I immensely enjoyed Paraic O’Donnell’s The Naming of the Birds, which plunges the audience into smelly, noisy late nineteenth-century London in the company of the redoubtable Inspector Cutter and somewhat less bluff sergeant Gideon Bliss * Financial Times *
This Victorian mystery novel is Dickens meets Sherlock Holmes meets La Femme Nikita, and it wears its genre conventions proudly. The heroes: a brilliant, gruff police officer and his bumbling assistant, aided by a plucky lady journalist. The crimes: elaborate serial murders of insignificant elderly men. The killings are connected to the book’s prologue, a harrowing tale of mistreated orphans seemingly in training to be assassins. The reader knows this, but the detectives do not, giving the events a frisson of dramatic irony as the body count ticks up * NPR, Books of the Year *

Paraic O’Donnell is a writer of fiction, poetry and criticism. His first novel, THE MAKER OF SWANS, was named the Amazon Rising Stars Debut of the Month for February 2016 and was shortlisted for the Bord Gais Energy Irish Book Awards in the Newcomer of the Year category. He lives in Wicklow, Ireland with his wife and two children.

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