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Paradise House
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By: Paul Perry
Publisher: Somerville Press
Published: May 2025
Pages: 192
Categories: Biography, Culture, History
Language: English
Available as: Paperback
On sale at:
ISBN-13: 9781036907952

When the great Irish writer James Joyce returned from exile in Trieste in 1909 to open Ireland’s first cinema in Dublin, he hoped the Volta Electric Theatre would be a great success. It was not a success, but an abysmal failure. Joyce returned to mainland Europe to forge the most brilliant of writing careers. But what if Cinematograph Volta, a venture the novelist and Joyce biographer Edna O’Brien once described as ‘ludicrous’, had been a great success, and what if James Joyce had stayed in Ireland to run a successful cinema business, and to become a movie mogul of sorts. The critically acclaimed and best-selling author of The Garden, Paul Perry imagines such an outcome in his new and brilliant counter-factual novel, Paradise House. The novel imagines James Joyce’s cinema, Ireland’s first, as a success and re-visions him as Gatsby in an Irish retelling of Fitzgerald’s classic while Ireland teeters on the threshold of revolution. Told from the point of view of the projectionist, and Joyce’s assistant, Jacob Moonlight, here is an homage to great works of literature. Paradise House is a novel brim full of nostalgia and longing in a world of what might have been from a writer described by Fred D’Aguiar as ‘prodigiously gifted.’

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