Novels
- Door Number Three (1995)
- The Gift (1997)
- The Impossible Bird (2002)
- 51 (2022)
Collections
- Other Voices, Other Doors (1997)
- The Black Heart (2009)
Novels Book Covers
Collections Book Covers
Patrick O’Leary Books Overview
Door Number Three
John Donelly’s life is changed forever the day Laura, a young therapy patient, tells him that she has been left for a year on Earth by the Holock, an alien race. If she can convince one person and she has chosen him that she is telling the truth, she can stay when they come back for her. And she exposes her breasts as evidence, revealing square nipples. His least profound response is to drop his cigarette into the crease in his chair. So begins the wildest SF novel since the passing of Philip K. Dick. Patrick O’Leary’s Door Number Three is a constant wellspring of surprise and wonder, a novel about a young man of today and a woman from somewhere else who is out to love or kill him or both. The whole, apparently real, world and everything in it can never be the same again.
The Gift
Science FictionLarge Print EditionOLeary displays his mastery of fantasy and social motifs, weaving familiar themes into a heartwarming, enchanting story. starred, Publishers Weekly A story within a story, The Gift is a story of innocence betrayed and magic rejected. Tim is robbed of his childhood, and Simon is tormented by hearing made too acute. Both are victims of The User of the Night, once a boy like them, now pathetically twisted by his own ambition and by Tomen, a malevolent creature of magic. Together Simon and Tim must rid their land of the magic that has been misused by Tomen and The User.
The Impossible Bird
There is a place a world where famine and poverty do not exist. Nor sickness nor misery nor unhappiness of any kind. Is it Heaven?As two brothers are about to discover, it’s more like Hell. Michael Glynn is a hotshot director addicted to a there s no success like excess hedonism. Daniel Glynn is a professor of literature, devoted husband, and doting father with a quietly buttoned down life. Brothers bound by blood. But brothers waging a private civil war an emotional feud of lies and deceit and dark secrets buried but not forgotten. But all that is about to change. One day the brothers are visited simultaneously by gun wielding strangers claiming to be agents of an elite government security agency. Each brother is questioned about the whereabouts of the other. What they want is the code. The strangers are convinced one of the brothers possesses the code, but they aren t sure which. Having maintained only sporadic contact, Michael and Daniel can be of no assistance. Or so they think. The strangers will not take no for an answer. Their instructions are simple: find your brother or die. But what begins as a cross country manhunt brother converging on brother turns into an odyssey of discovery neither could have imagined. It is a journey that will take them to a world of perfect human happiness. A world purged of suffering. A world without death. A world where a life can be relived and mistakes corrected. Both have been given a second chance. The question is, is a second chance what they really need?For Michael and Daniel the answer to that question will be found by unraveling the mystery of The Impossible Bird.
Other Voices, Other Doors
Other Voices, Other Doors collects the best stories, poems and non fiction of the last twenty years by Patrick O’Leary, acclaimed author of DOOR NUMBER THREE and THE GIFT. Other Voices, Other Doors is an unabashedly different book. It is a celebration of the inexhaustible shape shifting power of stories. It is fantastic. It is mundane. And we are not in Kansas anymore. Disturbing, amusing, frank and original, Other Voices, Other Doors is Patrick O’Leary’s first and probably last collection of writing. Foreword by Gene Wolfe. Patrick O Leary wants to tell you a story: about Van Morrison, and vasectomies, and the aliens who are us; about the way it feels really feels to be alive and loving and hurting in a world made of wonders. So pull up a chair, open this book: and listen. Kathe Koja, author of Extremities Other Voices, Other Doors is essential O Leary zany, serious, unclassifiable, and delightful. It reveals the many brilliant facets of a deeply humane and utterly original writer. Kathleen Ann Goonan, author of Crescent City Rhapsody Other Voices, Other Doors neatly captures the kaleidescopic nature of Patrick O Leary’s imagination. Begin reading with any piece short story, essay, poem and when next you check the time you will find hours have flown like some impossible bird. A truly hypnotic collection. Jeffrey Ford, author of The Physiognomy From LOCUS Magazine, January 2001: Though today’s publishing field is making it harder and harder to find volumes devoted to shorter pieces, collections live on thanks to small presses and the burgeoning print on demand business. We should also be grateful to those masters of the field who are willing to support newcomers. Gene Wolfe provides an entertaining intro to Patrick O’Leary’s Other Voices, Other Doors, subtitled ‘A Collection of Stories, Meditations, and Poems’…
he shows us through one of those doors and introduces us to the work of an author ‘so damned human it’s a wonder the man eating sharks haven’t come ashore to get him.’ An author, this reader can now report, whose quirky versatality and hidden depths remind me of none other than Gene Wolfe. If I were really clever, I might be able to disguise this review as something other than a rave. But nah Wolfe and O’Leary are the masters at that game. So I just urge you to take a look at Other Voices, Other Doors. You won’t be disappointed. Faren Miller, Locus
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