STATION TO STATION
Johnny Gogan’s second novel Station to Station published by Lepus Print.
Quixotic junior Irish diplomat Jack Lennon is posted to Spain in 2008 as the wheels are coming off the Spanish - and Irish - property boom. When a visiting government minister gives him the slip, Seville government press officer Teresa Paz comes to his assistance. Together they pursue John Paul Grealish through the southern coast and are led to the secretive Playa de los Alemanes. They encounter a coterie of Ireland's 'wine geese', jaded celebrities, desperate bankers, and an unusual property development. Ten years later, Jack is on his knees on a remote monastic island in Donegal still trying to work out exactly what happened.
DRY TAKE ON THE SPY NOVEL
“Johnny Gogan's Station to Station (Lepus Print, €13) opens on Station Island in Lough Derg, where the former Irish diplomat Jack Lennon has travelled to make something of a last stand. Jack, we learn, was once a poet who somehow inveigled his way into the ranks of the Irish diplomatic corps; dispatched to Spain at the height of the Celtic Tiger boom, Jack found himself operating "more at the arse-wiping than the intellectual end of the Diplomatic Service".
When the visiting Minister for the Marine and professional cute hoor John Paul Grealish anoints Don Patricio O’Reilly – a descendant of the “Wine Geese” – an honorary consul, all hell breaks loose, and things go from bad to worse when Jack discovers that O’Reilly is in cahoots with the last remnants of those Nazis who fled to Franco’s Spain post-1945.
What follows is a delightfully dry take on the spy novel – while John le Carré’s spies operate along Moscow Rules, Irish diplomats follow Lambay Rules, according to which anything that happens east of Lambay Island is fair game – and Jack Lennon is terrific company as he goes ricocheting around southern Spain as a self-styled ‘Don Quixote on another wild goose chase’.” DECLAN BURKE, Irish Times, 30/06/2022
“The central character, a likeable poet turned junior diplomat, tries to safeguard Ireland's honour amid Celtic Tiger skulduggery. But he finds himself struggling with a wayward minister, inflexible bureaucracy and dark undercurrents in southern Spain. What's not to enjoy?” MARTINA DEVLIN
Ghost Writers
Dublin 1988: Against the backdrop of a city approaching the end of a long decline, the impoverished poets of the Dublin Poetry Collective - aspiring poet Jack Lennon among them - are preparing to do battle for a paltry poetry prize commemorating a recently deceased poet.
“Poets, piss-artists, lovers, worriers; Dreamers, Lefties, witches, gurriers - Johnny Gogan’s canvas is the counter-cultural Dublin of the pre-boom era, a city half-emptied by emigration, and dying of corruption. Anyone who came of age in that long-gone town will give a bitter-sweet smile of recognition”
Joseph O’Connor