At its core, the novel is about modern Ireland, immigration, emigration, and a young man’s reckoning with his family’s role in its history, past and future.
“Seamus Boshell's The Great Wall of Ballygall is pure music and magic, a reader's delight. My god, the writing! Lucid and lyrical, amusing and wise, not a word out of place. What do they call it? Perfect pitch? Well, if a book can have it, this one does. And what a story our charming narrator, Finn McCormack, tells us: comedic and insightful, tender and stoic. A tale of love and mad dreams, family and land. A glorious piece of literature and a profound work of the imagination. Bravo, Seamus Boshell!!”
“Fantastical, comical and richly plied with home truths about a changing but in some respects unchanged Ireland, grappling with its past and imbued with dark family secrets, The Great Wall of Ballygall is a deeply satirical, imaginative, wild-ride tale like no other novel you will have read.”
“This audacious, kaleidoscopic novel features an unforgettable cast of characters from Ireland, Nigeria and America, all of them determined to live at high velocity as they hurtle into vexed modernity. Antic yet sobering, hilarious yet soulful, the novel’s many moving parts ultimately cohere into an indelible group portrait sure to take up permanent residence in the reader’s grateful heart.”