Fleet acquires Seamas O’Reilly's memoir

Fleet has acquired the first book of Observer columnist Seamas O’Reilly, a memoir called Did Ye Hear Mammy Died?

The memoir centres on O’Reilly's experience of growing up as one of 11 children in rural Northern Ireland in the 1990s after the death of their mother when he was five.

Fleet will publish Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? as a hardback, trade paperback in export, and e-book in March 2020. Little, Brown will publish in the US. Rights were acquired from Matthew Hamilton at Aitken Alexander.

In the book O’Reilly delves into his family - "his pleasingly eccentric, reticent but deeply loving father; his rambunctious siblings, intent on enforcing a byzantine age-based hierarchy; and the numerous bewildering friends, relations and neighbours who blew in and out to ‘help’" - and describes how his mother’s death changed his childhood relationships.

O’Reilly also describes what it was like to live in Northern Ireland at the end of the Troubles on the Irish border, including the time an IRA bomb blew out their windows when he was three, and covers his teenage years as a nascent political radical and amateur satirist, to his arrival in Dublin as a university student.

According to Fleet, it is "the story of a boy growing up; a family bonded by loss, love and mockery; and their triumphs and disasters as they reached for their goal of some kind of normality".

O’Reilly writes for the Observer, as well as for the Irish Times, New Statesman, Guts and VICE. He is also known for "Remembering Ireland", a parody of Irish nostalgia sites, and a long Twitter thread posted in 2016 about the effects Brexit would have on Northern Ireland.