THE GHOSTS OF ROME by Joseph O’Connor has been shortlisted for the esteemed 2025 Kerry Group Novel of The Year award.
The prize is the largest monetary prize for fiction available solely to an Irish author, with €20,000 awarded to the winner, and €500 to each of the shortlisted writers. Previous winners include SMALL THINGS LIKE THESE by Claire Keegan, MY NAME IS LEON by Kit de Waal and A GIRL IS A HALF-FORMED THING by Eimear McBride.
The other shortlisted titles for this year’s prize are OUR LONDON LIVES by Christine Dwyer Hickey, HEART, BE AT PEACE by Donal Ryan, LONG ISLAND by Colm Tóibín and TIME OF THE CHILD by Niall Williams. The winner will be announced at the opening ceremony of the Listowel Writers’ Week in County Kerry on Wednesday 28th May.
Ned O’Sullivan, Chairperson of the Board of Listowel Writers’ Week, said, ‘Congratulations to the five shortlisted authors, your novels reflect the richness and diversity of contemporary Irish fiction, and we’re proud to honour your work here in Listowel.’
THE GHOSTS OF ROME is the second in Joseph O’Connor’s riveting Escape Line trilogy and was first published in hardback by Harvill Secker and Europa Editions in January 2025 to great acclaim. It immediately went to Number One in the Irish bestseller chart, and remains in the Irish Original Fiction Top Ten chart now.
The first novel in the trilogy, MY FATHER’S HOUSE, was also an Irish Number One bestseller and has now sold more than 100,000 copies in the English language. It was shortlisted for the 2024 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction and the Eason An Post Irish Novel of the year 2023, and also longlisted for the 2024 Dublin Literary Award. Film rights are optioned and translation rights are also sold in Brazil, France, Germany, Holland, Italy, Poland, Spain and Sweden.
About THE GHOSTS OF ROME:
February 1944. Six months since Nazi forces occupied Rome. Inside the beleaguered city, the Contessa Giovanna Landini is a member of the band of Escape Line activists known as ‘The Choir’. Their mission is to smuggle refugees to safety and help Allied soldiers, all under the nose of Gestapo boss Paul Hauptmann.
During a ferocious morning air raid a mysterious parachutist lands in Rome and disappears into the backstreets. Is he an ally or an imposter? His fate will come to put the whole Escape Line at risk.
Meanwhile, Hauptmann’s attention has landed on the Contessa. As his fascination grows, she is pulled into a dangerous game with him – one where the consequences could be lethal.
Joe is currently working on the next novel in the trilogy, to be published in the UK and the US in early 2027.
Photo credit: Urszula Soltys
About Joseph O’Connor
Joseph O’Connor was born in Dublin, where he still lives. THE GHOSTS OF ROME is his eleventh novel: he is also the author of film scripts, radio and stage plays, two collections of short stories, and several bestselling works of non-fiction.
2022 was the 20th anniversary of Joseph O’Connor’s novel STAR OF THE SEA which was an international bestseller, selling more than a million copies in the UK alone and being published in 38 languages. It won France’s Prix Millepages, Italy’s Premio Acerbi, the Irish Post Award for Fiction, the Nielsen Bookscan Golden Book Award, an American Library Association Award, the Hennessy/Sunday Tribune Hall of Fame Award, and the Prix Litteraire Zepter for European Novel of the Year.
His novel GHOST LIGHT was chosen as Dublin’s One City Book novel for 2011. Published in 2019, SHADOWPLAY, has won him extraordinary praise, was shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize, The Dalkey Novel Prize, the Costa Novel Prize, among others, and won him Novel of the Year at the An Post Irish Book Awards. The French edition was shortlisted for the Jean Monnet Prize and the Vintage paperback was a Richard and Judy Winter 2020 pick.
He holds an honorary Doctorate in Literature from University College Dublin and received the Irish PEN Award for Outstanding Contribution to Irish Literature in 2012. He is the Inaugural Frank McCourt Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Limerick.
Praise for THE GHOSTS OF ROME
‘THE GHOSTS OF ROME, Joseph O’Connor’s second novel in his projected trilogy about Rome under Nazi occupation, blazes with the imaginative flair and narrative energy that won its predecessor, MY FATHER’S HOUSE, high acclaim… There’s no slackening of tension, though, in the gripping account of wartime heroism, risk and resourcefulness this book continues. Jeopardy quivers through it… . The ugly stratum of Nazi oppression O’Connor’s novel graphically resurrects is packed with sensuously evoked reminders of Rome's rich past in this haunted and haunting novel.’ – Peter Kemp, The Sunday Times
‘O’Connor’s prose creates an extraordinary picture of Rome under Nazi control; brutal, chaotic, treacherous, decaying, wrecked and crumbling, and yet sometimes still bathed in glorious and unexpected light, literally and metaphorically. THE GHOSTS OF ROME is described as a sequel to MY FATHER’S HOUSE. The term is inadequate. Each can be read without reference to the other, but together they make a whole greater than the parts. An epic of war… O’Connor’s theme is not the world war in its widest sense, nor even the moral discomfort that is Vatican neutrality. Yet THE GHOSTS OF ROME make its own statement about these things. Focusing on people whose response to evil is only to act, he opens us to a humanity too urgent for debate and analysis.’ – Michael Russell, The Irish Times
‘The Choir’s attempts to rescue a grievously wounded Polish airman right under the nose of Gestapo commander Paul Hauptmann, who has been warned of the Fuhrer’s “intense displeasure” at his failure to eradicate the Escape Line, have a nail-bitingly tense “real time” feel to them. BBC interviews from the 1960s with former Choir members and fragments of an unpublished memoir give historical perspective and added pathos to this vivid and moving story, with O’Connor seamlessly combining real characters with imagined ones.’ – Laura Wilson, The Guardian, ‘The best recent crime and thrillers’
‘The power of THE GHOSTS OF ROME comes from the dazzling variety of voices employed, the sense of a world constructed in the multiple dimensions… O’Connor has often been likened to the great Irish modernists for the lyricism of his voice-driven novels. But THE GHOSTS OF ROME also situates him within a broader European tradition of memory and moral reckoning, one that returns again and again to World War II. O’Connor embraces this legacy while transcending its cliches. His Rome is not merely a setting but a crucible, a city where the sacred and the profane collide, where resilience is forged in the shadow of ruins. By crafting a chorus of voices, he ensures that no single narrative dominates, reflecting the messy, multifaceted truths of history – the way it is lived and how it is constructed in retrospect. What emerges in not just a wartime thriller, though it is that, but a mediation on how we remember, how we resist and how, even in the darkest times, humanity endures.’ – Alex Preston, The New York Times
‘O’Connor has done his research with care, drawing on O’Flaherty’s unpublished letters, diaries and journalism. With his real people in place, the author spins a new tale of derring-do, recounted with the help of imagined interviews conducted many years later… O’Connor paints a lively picture of a city filled with Fascist police and German soldiers, some on furlough from the North, everyone watchful and hungry, the streets filthy, the black-market prices rising every day… THE GHOSTS OF ROME is both a tribute to the imagination and courage of his remarkable team and a riveting thriller.’ – Caroline Moorehead, The Times Literary Supplement
Visit Joseph O’Connor’s website.
