BOOKS
Broken Irish (2011)
Buy The Book: Indiebound/Amazon/BN.com/Powells
Publisher's Weekly (Starred review and featured review of the week):
“Delaney sets his new novel (after Warp & Weft) in South Boston, Mass., where a wonderfully realized cast of downtrodden characters struggle to overcome tough predicaments in the final years of the 20th century. After alcoholic copywriter Jimmy Gilbride loses his job, a rich entrepreneur offers him a lucrative ghostwriting opportunity; crestfallen widow Colleen mourns her military husband and struggles to raise her secretive 13-year-old son, Christopher, while offering clandestine help to Jeanmarie, a reckless teenage runaway with a sketchy boyfriend. Meanwhile, Father John is retiring from the priesthood with an overwhelming sense of uselessness and a guilty conscience. Christopher starts spending time with Jeanmarie, which doesn't sit well with her boyfriend. As the boy braces for violence and Colleen appeals to the church, blackouts, memory lapses, and liver problems get in the way of Jimmy's new job. In short, clipped chapters (nearly 100), Delaney gracefully guides his rich tapestry, his characters' serpentine circumstances converging toward conclusions that offer little catharsis. There's nary a blue sky in sight in Delaney's world, but readers will be captivated. The author continues to demonstrate great dexterity and storytelling acumen in his lyrical page-turner.”
Kirkus Reviews (Starred review as “a book of remarkable merit”)
“Broken Irish Americans from South Boston, that is—and there’s plenty of brokenness to go around at the turn of the 21st century.
Delaney plots his narrative through parallel story lines, all of which elegantly converge at the end of the novel. Delaney keeps all of the incipient tragedy beautifully and heartbreakingly balanced through artful plotting and an unadorned but graceful prose style."
ALA Booklist (Starred Review):
"An elegantly written and compellingly plotted novel"
Library Journal (Starred review):
"A masterpiece... highly recommended"
Boston Globe:
"Delaney focuses on relatable, human drama that makes the novel and its characters truly indelible."
Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune:
"The novel has a complex plot and a driving, fast-paced narrative. Jimmy Gilbride is the main character, a writer who has wasted most of his young life drinking. Sober at last, he's hired to write a private memoir for a rich investment banker who escaped Southie's poverty. The strange memoir is a story within the novel and it eventually reveals unexpected connections among the other troubled souls in this highly recommended book."
Shelf -Awareness.com "Shelf Discovery":
"The drama of people reaching that conclusion, or its opposite, lends Broken Irish its power-- -a great story that reaches into a reader's life and makes us reconsider how autonomous we really are."
The Brooklyn Rail:
"Delaney’s prose is smooth throughout, rhythmic and relentless in its pursuit of the heartbeat behind the words, the introspective torture that looms beyond nervous breathing, twitchy hands, and that display of everyday yet inimitable dementia to which we can give no proper name. He wrestles with each character, strives to pin them long enough to match with the right adjective, the perfect degree of candor, then lets them off the mat in anxious anticipation of what they will do next. And when the fateful stars of his style and syntax align just right, the page glistens with poetic charisma."
SFGate.com:
"A nuanced and elegant novel of troubled South Boston in the 1990s, with much going on beneath the surface."
Born To Play: My Life in The Game(2009)
Co-author on 2008 American League MVP Dustin Pedroia's book on his rise to prominence as a member of the Boston Red Sox. Published in July 2009 by Simon Spotlight Entertainment, an imprint of Simon & Schuster
Warp & Weft (2004)
2005 PEN/Winship Award
From Publisher's Weekly:
"Three men slog through days in a New England textile mill and while away the nights in a working-class town in Delaney's quietly lyrical first novel (after 1999's The Drowning and Other Stories). Just 16, Dominic drops out of school to work at Chace Finishing, where Machado, who immigrated from the Azores islands in his middle age, and Carey, a lifer, also toil. It's 1978, and the mill isn't what it used to be; even in boom times the work was long and hard. In short chapters from alternating points of view, Delaney reveals Dominic's desire to prove himself to his bitter, wheelchair-bound father; Machado's resistance to his wife's wish to return to their former home; and Carey's hopes of becoming foreman and his obsession with the mill's softball team. The older workers' life frustrations are deflected onto rookies like Dominic and Parry, a local rich man's son; even as the boys adjust to the work (or, as in Parry's case, eventually quit), life itself pushes them, and the rest of the book's characters, to their limits. Delaney portrays the landscape and the milieu with impressionistic grace, but when it comes to plot, too often primitive tests of manhood (fighting, lifting 55-gallon drums of dye and scoring at ball games) substitute for more profound challenges. Yet Delaney's evocation of the quotidian is affecting, and his empathy is evident on every page of this somber and graceful book."
The Drowning & Other Stories (1999)
From Publisher's Weekly:
"The credible, plainspeaking characters in Delaney's sure-footed first collection of nine stories--priests, drunks, conspiracy theorists, criminals--have taken wrong turns in the past that lend their present lives a sad irony. In "Travels with Mr. Slush," an ex-felon who drives a truck that sells crushed, flavored ice through urban neighborhoods suddenly finds himself the victim of crime when youths steal his car battery on the hottest day of the summer, melting his entire load. Yet the tale closes with a surprising, cautious optimism. In "O Beauty! O Truth!" a boy who ridicules his strict teachers foreshadows his shooting death years later by police officers as he leaves a crime scene. Characters usually find crucial life decisions made for them by forces beyond their control. The 17-year-old narrator of "A Visit To My Uncle" travels to New York to ask his rich, estranged relative for money for medicl school; he is nonplussed when his uncle (a lwayer) offers to pay his way, but only under maipulative conditions. The standout title story tells of a tormented former priest who suddenly emigrates in middle age from Ireland to America. His new life includes a new vocation as a hod carrier and a new name, an act born of panicked necessity after he disposes of the dead body of a possible traitor, a constable in the RIC, in a lake. In the less dramatic pieces, Delaney wisely lets a poignant situation tell its own story. In "The Anchor and Me," a mild-tempered husband is unable to say whether he feels jealous or proud of his anchorwoman spouse's driven, successful life and career; the antihero of "Notes Toward My Absolution" robs convenience stores with an unloaded gun. Delaney's measured pace imparts a grace to his tales, which at their best are reminiscent of Cheever or Updike's grittiest efforts. Few words are wasted in this quietly triumphant collection."