Dolly Considine runs a late-night drinking establishment catering to the needs of thirsty politicians and theatricals in Dublin's legendary drinking area, the Catacombs.Julian Ryder (aka Paddy Butler) is an eighteen-year-old aspiring writer in need of shelter from his bullying older brother. As the new live-in lounge assistant at Dolly Considine's Hotel, Julian soon embroils himself in the shebeen's gossip - and the guests' bedsheets - and turns Dolly's entourage into fodder for his literary ambitions. Reality quickly becomes difficult to separate from fantasy...

Dolly Considine’s Hotel moves fluidly between the 1950s – Dolly’s youth, the political dynasty of the man she marries and the man she sleeps with and the early days of the Fianna Fail party (aka the Soldiers of Destiny) – and the summer of 1983 leading up to the pro-life constitutional ballot.

Woven through Dolly’s story is Julian’s Summer of Unrequited Love, containing accounts of his sexual adventures and his attempts to keep his fantastical journals out of Dolly’s hands.

The hotel becomes the stage for farce and tragedy, culminating in the Referendum Victory Party (with which the book opens) when sword-wielding Irish dancers act as midwives to the birth of Julian from a grotesque papier-mâché representation of a mythical Mother Ireland

Julian's fictions, Dolly's Secrets, narrow party politics, and the grotesque papier-mache figure of Mother Ireland giving birth surrounded by sword-wielding dancers, all combine into a rich cocktail which threatens to blow them, and even Ireland itself, wide apart.

But will it be his story about the IRA’s planned mass prison break, or his revelations regarding the funding for the pro-life referendum campaign, or the distress he’s causing to the political establishment, that will bring an end to his shebeen career?

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