Prestige Drama

by Séamas O'Reilly

Derry is already abuzz with news that famous American actor, Monica Logue, has flown to the city and will be starring in a new series set during the Troubles. And then she goes missing...

All eyes are on Diarmuid, the flaky scriptwriter who was the last to see Monica alive. From budding young actors hoping for a role to grieving parent whose story forms the backbone of the narrative; newspaper editors covering the mystery to taxi drivers hearing all the news from their clients, The Dogs in the Street follows the city's cast as they all try to locate themselves in Monica's disappearance.

Séamas O'Reilly's debut novel is a comedy about dramatising tragedy, and the responsibilities of a teller to a tale. It brings to life the voices of a city, the people, families and communities who find themselves obsessed with, and terrified of, interrogating their past.

Genres: Fiction, Ireland, Mystery, Irish Literature, Thriller, Literary Fiction, Contemporary

288 pages, Hardcover

Expected publication August 18, 2026

About the author

Séamas O’Reilly is a columnist for the Observer and writes about media and politics for the Irish Times, New Statesman, Guts, and VICE. He lives in Hackney with his family.

Reviews

[emma]

big fan of them on tv. surely i'll like the book

[Kathleen · Rating 3 out of 5]

The writing style was not easy to follow for me.

[Marybeth ❤️ · Rating 5 out of 5]

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 5/5

Thank you to NetGalley, and Little, Brown Book Group for the chance to read this ARC.

Prestige Drama is a compelling and engaging novel that explores how a Northern Irish community grapples with its past when a Hollywood film crew arrives in Derry to make a movie about the Troubles. The story takes a turn when the lead actress goes missing, and the Derry locals conversations reveal a range of perspectives on memory, history, and identity. Some wish to forget the past, while others are willing to confront it. This tension between older and younger generations gives the novel depth and nuance, showing how the legacy of conflict continues to shape individual lives and collective memory.

O’Reilly’s prose is authentic and colloquial to Northern Ireland, with long, conversational sentences that capture the rhythms of Northern Irish speech and make the characters feel real. The longer running sentences made it feel conversational rather than like reading a book, and brought an intimacy to the novel. The dialogue is sharp, often witty, and infused with warmth and humour. As someone from Antrim in Northern Ireland this intimacy was felt on a personal level.

The characters feel like people you could meet on the streets of Derry, and while I was reading it I could almost hear the dialect in the writing. While this is familiar to locals, at the same time, it remains highly accessible to readers outside of Northern Ireland, offering a nuanced understanding of the Troubles through an unmistakably Irish lens.

The ending, without spoilers, really does underline the enduring impact of the Troubles. Fans of Derry Girls will appreciate the humour and local authenticity, while readers who enjoyed The Bee Sting by Paul Murray will recognise the blend of sharp wit and deeper, contemplative themes. Prestige Drama is a remarkable blend of insight, humour, and humanity, and I believe it will resonate strongly with readers both in Northern Ireland but also offering international readers a powerful and accessible entry point into this history.

The only minor gripe I had with this was that it was not long enough. I will be buying this for my friends and family, as I know they will appreciate it too!!

[Yalla Balagan · Rating 2 out of 5]

A Hollywood detective comes to Derry to play a grieving mother, and disappears before filming starts. Séamas O'Reilly hands the case to the entire town, voice by voice, so the missing star becomes a mirror held up against everybody holding it.

Diarmuid, the screenwriter behind "Dead City," gets first crack at the microphone. His chapters carry the bile of a man asked to turn his childhood into "prestige drama," a phrase he repeats with disgust. Executives want lavish misery out of the Troubles, and Diarmuid, half drunk and fully resentful, supplies plenty of misery while pocketing the lavish part as his own fee.

Then the floor opens to florists, taxi drivers, mammies, and mediums, each one approaching the vanishing from a different street corner of gossip. A florist clocks the local paper's interest rate on scandal against press release. A taxi driver makes a quiet hobby of the search, adding extra laps around the likely spots between fares. A medium, granddaughter of a woman known for screaming at tree stumps for a living, brings second sight to bear on a missing actress with the same matter-of-fact tone meant for a leaking gutter.

Comedy and grief share a kettle here, both poured at full strength. Derry is a place where a joke about hunger strikers can clear a pub in seconds and a dead boy's blood gets remembered as the color of petrol. The humor sits right beside the violence, close enough to swap drinks with it.

Monica gets the closing chapter. She studied the local vowels with the devotion of a linguist and the vanity of a performer convinced her ear beats every other ear in the room, collecting "burst," "cracker," and "altogeller" the way a magpie collects foil. Her disappearance, once explained, turns out to be a calculated performance in a book already crowded with calculated performances.

Early chapters plant details that pay out three voices later, an off-hand mention becoming a central pivot, the gossip of one narrator quietly correcting the certainty of another. Every voice tells a partial story at best, and the gaps between testimonies generate more friction than any single testimony does alone.

O'Reilly grew up in this city and it shows on the page, his ear tuned past mere transcription, catching the music in "boggin," "ragin," and "canny" without a phonetics seminar breaking out. This is a comic mystery filled with small-town gossip, and a study of what a place does with outside attention once it shows up uninvited. Didn't care for the structure of the narrative. I found it disjointed and confusing which is unnecessary for such a short book. Also, very little new ground was broken.

Derry gets watched, judged, and cast, by Hollywood and by its own residents, and the verdict each narrator hands down tells you more about the judge than the judged. A missing movie star turns out to be the easiest person in town to find. Everybody else stays elusive a good while longer.





❤️ 🇮🇱

[Paula · Rating 5 out of 5]

Extraordinary,a gem. A polyphonic,great tale.Wonderful writing.
Irish writers are the BEST.

[Courtney Autumn · Rating 4 out of 5]

"𝘏𝘰𝘸 𝘥𝘰 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘵𝘢𝘭𝘬 𝘢𝘣𝘰𝘶𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘱𝘢𝘴𝘵 𝘢𝘴 𝘢 𝘱𝘦𝘳𝘴𝘰𝘯 𝘴𝘵𝘪𝘭𝘭 𝘭𝘪𝘷𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘪𝘵, 𝘪𝘯 𝘢 𝘱𝘭𝘢𝘤𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘣𝘢𝘳𝘦𝘭𝘺 𝘴𝘶𝘳𝘷𝘪𝘷𝘦𝘥 𝘪𝘵?"

A few years ago, I read Séamas O'Reilly’s memoir 𝘋𝘪𝘥 𝘠𝘦 𝘏𝘦𝘢𝘳 𝘔𝘢𝘮𝘮𝘺 𝘋𝘪𝘦𝘥 and have been waiting to see him make his official foray into fiction. Enter 𝗣𝗿𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗶𝗴𝗲 𝗗𝗿𝗮𝗺𝗮.

When Hollywood decides to take over Derry and create a production centered around the Troubles, it spurs the locals to confront and reconcile their own memories and history of the violent time. Some wish to forget and keep the past in the past; others are finally ready to face it. And everyone has a thought or two about the missing lead actress.

𝗣𝗿𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗶𝗴𝗲 𝗗𝗿𝗮𝗺𝗮 packs quite a bit into its quaint size of roughly 200 pages. Through a mosaic of perspectives, including the screenwriter who’s returned home, a mother who’s still grieving, and an ex-IRA member, a compelling portrait is drawn displaying how the conflict’s legacy persists within their collective memory and how it continues to shape their lives years later.

O’Reilly’s prose offers an unmistakable Irish lens. The colloquial dialogue and stream of conscious style in the characters’ narratives add authenticity and intimacy; it feels as though you’re having a personal, genuine conversation with these characters. So many use self-deprecating humor as camouflage and armor in a highly relatable way. There’s also a conversation to be had on the commercialization of this troubled piece of history, and O’Reilly doesn’t shy away from having it.

𝗣𝗿𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗶𝗴𝗲 𝗗𝗿𝗮𝗺𝗮 is an overall complex and engaging fictional debut from O’Reilly. It’s sharp, witty, and insightful, and fans of Irish literature (hey, hi, hello) will eat it up.

✨️ Thanks to Cordelia at Cardinal Publishing for the ARC! [𝘗𝘶𝘣 𝘥𝘢𝘵𝘦: 5•5•2026]

[Jeanette]

DNF I got more than half way through. I do think you get to begin to understand the Troubles much more than other erudite writing. BUT! For me the crude, crude language and several other factors make it too time consuming to tread the muck on the bottom of this swimming pool. Not a good comparison, I know. But the muck is tremendous. And the way of constant stream of minutia also drowning. It does get its point across- as with a sledge hammer. Triple UGH!

[Dede · Rating 3 out of 5]

I thought this was a very strange book. I didn't really like. I thought it could have had a better storyline. I am not real sure that I would recommend this book.

[Chloe]

#Gifted

Like many people, I loved Séamas O’ Reilly’s memoir “Did Ye Hear Mammy Died” a few years back so I had high expectations for his first novel; “Prestige Drama”, and I was not disappointed.

Famous American actress Monica Logue (I was absolutely picturing Gillian Anderson here) has flown in to Derry to star in a new series set during the Troubles. The locals all have varying opinions on this; Scriptwriter Diarmuid sees it as his redemption for being a failure up to this point, and as a way to prove everyone wrong. Some folks like that Derry and the Troubles will be in the spotlight again, whereas others wish the film crews would all just feck off.
Anne-Marie in particular who is still grieving her murdered son is struggling with the thoughts of another dramatisation of their lives.

That’s all a moot point anyway, as Monica Logue has disappeared almost immediately after arriving in the city. Diarmuid is the main suspect as he saw her last, but really everyone has a theory and soon enough all sorts of sightings of the actress are being whispered about.

This is such an incredibly well-written book; it’s crisp and fresh, actually laugh-out-loud funny but simultaneously poignant and deeply honest. I marked so many sections I wanted to read aloud to my husband that for a finish I just told him to read it himself 😅.

As it’s narrated by several different people we get a genuine feel for both the past and present of Derry. The conversational tone and colloquial language make it feel very real and I think this book will resonate with a lot of people, both in Ireland and further afield.

Basically, I loved it and can’t say enough good things about it. I would have read another 200 pages of this writing, and can’t wait to see what O’ Reilly does next.

With many thanks @elaineeganbooks @fleetreads for my early copy. Prestige Drama is out on the 7th of May. All opinions are my own, as always.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Derry is abuzz because extremely famous actor Monica Logue is in town. She's taken the lead role in a series about the Troubles and has arrived early for research. Then she goes missing. We get a load of different perspectives from locals talking about the show, Monica, the screenwriter Diarmuid and sometimes just random petty grievances.

This is so well done. It is actually funny, I'd laughed out loud a few times by page 10. It asks the question 'who gets to tell these stories?' because although the screenwriter is a local fella, the film crew, production company, lead actor are all a combination of American and British. Also, for people whose life is being fictionalised for this show, do they even want the story told?

You can tell Séamas O'Reilly has repeatedly been asked "have you read Say Nothing?" lol. Really excellent stuff, he's such a brilliant writer.
*read via Netgalley

[Lauren M · Rating 4 out of 5]

A one-sitting read, both because it is short and sweet and because I was immediately drawn in. Set in Derry, when the circus comes to town — the circus, in this case, being a buzzy Troubles-set TV show (the “prestige drama” of the title, of course) starring an American actress who immediately does a runner and/or is the victim of foul play and/or has adopted a persona as the town weirdo, depending on who you ask. And this book asks everyone, with every chapter being from the POV of a different local a la Donal Ryan’s The Spinning Heart (with the only recurring voice being that of the show’s screenwriter, Diarmuid).

Each chapter is fleeting, only a few pages long, but even in such brief meetings author Séamas O’Reilly ensures we get a rich sense of the characters, creating an entertaining and complex picture of the situation and its setting. At times laugh-out-loud funny, at other moments tugging at the heartstrings, this novel does so much with its runtime (pagetime?).

Ideal for fans of Derry Girls, Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting, or O’Reilly’s humor as showcased in his newspaper columns and in the viral thread in which he recounted meeting the President of Ireland while on ketamine, which remains the funniest thing ever written on the trash fire formally known as Twitter.

[Terry · Rating 4 out of 5]

Short, satirical, lyrical, and at times bitter and sweet, this is a difficult but unforgettable read. (I say difficult because it takes a little getting used to, to read it as Northern Irishmen speak it.).

Written in long, conversational sentences from the point of view of multiple characters, but faithful to Irish conversation, descriptive and full of wit, and wisdom.
*I gratefully received this bo mmk 8ok from the publisher and author in exchange for a review. Thank you! Júiu7j

[Geonn Cannon · Rating 5 out of 5]

A really great book that proves you don't need to be a 500 page/18 hour doorstopper to tell a full and satisfying story. I loved all the characters, I liked the screenwriter a lot (holding out on love until I knew for a fact if he was/wasn't a killer, of course), and I found the ending weirdly satisfying. I'd definitely read this one again.

[Rachael Dockery · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5/5 - Funny - surprisingly at times - often but not always because of the colloquialisms and turns of phrase. The plot, however, seemed lacking.

[Caroline · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is almost not a novel because of its structure, but I still thought it was well done and laugh-out-loud funny at times!

[Kerri · Rating 4 out of 5]

Derry amach is amach. Great insight into many characters but would have preferred to return to some of them again.

[Conor Dooney · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great wee book, hi.

[Kate Vane · Rating 4 out of 5]

Prestige Drama has great writing that can swoop from hilarity to horror in a sentence. Each chapter is narrated by a different character – with the exception of the screenwriter, Diarmuid, whose voice recurs at different points in the novel. It's a brilliant device – simultaneously satirising the way people cannibalise the stories of communities under stress to sell a story, while also telling that story, and there are some clever twists along the way.

It highlights the different impacts of the Troubles and their aftermath - how the violence destroyed lives, but also for some meant identity and purpose. (One character highlights that more people have died since the Good Friday Agreement by suicide, than were killed during the Troubles.) It’s an entertaining read, full of inventive language, but the brutality and absurdity it portrays stay with you.
*
Copy from NetGalley

[Ben Dutton · Rating 5 out of 5]

The journalist and non-fiction writer Seamas O'Reilly's debut novel, Prestige Drama, is a look at the Troubles and their legacy in Northern Ireland through the prism of a TV drama about to be made there - until the leading actress goes missing. From this crime novel like concept, O'Reilly spins a novel which is both comedic and dramatic, told from a number of differing viewpoints, to create something which is both memorable and moving. It is a short novel which I read in one sitting, entirely engaged by O'Reilly's prose which really captures the cadence and voice of the Northern Irish, and his characterisation was spot-on. This is a very fine debut with a broad appeal, and I really enjoyed reading this one.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publishers for the ARC.

[Andy Weston · Rating 2 out of 5]

This belongs to the category of books in which the publisher’s summary promise a plot and then doesn’t have one.

A novel in which the plot is insignificant can allow for greater character development and in this case, humour, but the characters used by O’Reilly here were not drawn deeply enough, and in his style of shifting tone, much of the humour is lost.

The book follows the filming of TV series Dead City, set during the troubles in Derry and written by local scriptwriter Diarmuid Walsh. It brings back up memories, anxieties and tensions of what one character notes are often referred to as ‘the good old days’.

The novel’s protagonists are the career-weary Walsh, whose segmented narrative thread just about holds everything together, and the ‘star attraction’, the actor he somewhat jealously nicknames ‘Miss Hollywood herself’, Monica Logue. Logie is missing at the start of the book with Walsh thought by many to have killed her.

In addition there is a considerable supporting cast, from a bereaved mother, to a journalist, a psychic, a former IRA assassin and a mural painter whose designs now adorn tea towels. They each have a chapter and express their viewpoint.

That Logue is missing, feared dead, is quite beside the point. One wonders why O’Reilly used the diversion. Essentially, it is written for laughs, and while some do amuse, many fall flat, relying heavily on the use of simile. With more direction, and the quips written around that, it would have worked better.

[Anupma · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of those electric books where the wit and charm hides the trauma or maybe the trauma is layered with sharp wit. Absolutely dug the structure and hats off to Seamas O’Reilly for pulling off a gripping narrative with only two constant characters- Diarmuid and the town of Derry. Everyone else gets one chapter and it still flows seamlessly.

[carol · Rating 2 out of 5]

The author's storytelling was difficult to follow (I don't think I'm in the minority of sharing this opinion). The characters' thoughts were clustered and I couldn't follow the plot well. Unfortunately, not for me.

[Saoirse McGuinness · Rating 5 out of 5]

Prestige Drama is about a Hollywood crew coming to Derry to make a TV show out’ve the Troubles & is told from the perspective of a loada Derry people - the mummy of a victim, a taxi driver, fellas who painted murals etc etc. I love love loved the writing style - the long run-on sentences that move so quick was just like reading people i know speak. It was funny, authentic, deep, contemplative, mysterious … alla the above. Ya ever read something and think, this is the type of funny I wish I was …. that’s this book. 10/10 NO FLAWS x

[callie ✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ:* *:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧ · Rating 5 out of 5]

packs quite a punch for such a short book! o’reilly’s ability write fully fleshed out perspectives despite only devoting a chapter to each character is very impressive, i really enjoyed this.

[Lynn Ankner · Rating 3 out of 5]

I got this as an ARC and have mixed feelings about it. In some ways I found the writing style to be hard to follow, but I could also truly "hear" the voices of the characters and their rapid fire stream of consciousness dialogue. There were many humorous moments. The ending left me unsatisfied though. I'm torn between 3 stars and 3.5 stars.

[Katie Steele · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very Irish, black humour, paid its homage to Derry Girls, lovely exposition of when to use the word “wee”. Roving story with several narrators which at times gave it a bit of a discontinuity. But hurtled along satisfyingly and overall a good read. I was reminded of the film Emotional Values which also parachuted a famous actress into an intimate tale.

[Rose vd Zwaard · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brill

[Emily Elisar · Rating 5 out of 5]

Perfect start to a beach read week.

[Donna Foster · Rating 4 out of 5]

Freaking chaos walking down memory lane reminiscing of the good old days while the disappearance of an actress ends in a moment in time.

[Jill Thomson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Derry boy Diarmurd Walsh is writing a drama about the Troubles.
This one is based on the murder of Jamie Devenney, a local boy shot in the head by a young British soldier.
The drama ‘Dead City’ has been snapped up by Tinseltown and a famous Hollywood actress Monica Logue, who is due to play the part of the dead boy’s mother, has come over to talk to the locals and work on her accent.
Trouble is she’s gone missing.
The story is told in short chapters by Diarmurd and other local residents, many of whom want to be cast in the forthcoming production and are helping in the search for her.
It’s funny, although bleak at times, particularly the thoughts of Anne-Marie, Jamie’s mother and his friend Jonny.
It highlights the tensions of present day Derry well, particularly the thoughts of the older generation who lived through it all and still carry their secrets.
The voices are authentic, the Northern Irish dialect brought to life in a close and conversational manner.
I did find it a bit disjointed in parts and wasn’t altogether convinced by the ending.
However it’s a great fiction debut from Séamas O’Reilly that deserves to do well.