Cameo

There is much to delight in. The satire is relentless but sharp, skewering everything from identity politics to the fickle nature of celebrity. The jokes are funny … and the prose is impeccable … Masterful * Financial Times *
Rob Doyle’s slutty third novel Cameo … A true thrill ride through heaven and hell * GQ *
Like Swift before him, Rob Doyle is a social satirist of the highest order who exists entirely in a genre of one. Here the literary world - and, indeed, the true horrors of the real world - are examined with a sharp pen and keen eye for the utter absurdity of it all. From microscopic to widescreen, the picaresque stories of Ren Duka are first an exercise in obfuscation and then ultimately revelation, showing Doyle as a truly pan-international writer. Cameo is provocative, transgressive, grimly hilarious, and it surely can’t be long until he spawns his own adjective. ‘Doylean’? Don’t rule it out – BENJAMIN MYERS, author of Cuddy
Curious, compassionate, filthy, iconoclastic … Cameo is mindbending fun and Rob Doyle yet again underlines his legend * LISA McINERNEY *
Abject and gleeful, Cameo refracts selfhood into a dazzle of authors writing characters, writing authors, writing at the edges of the real. By rattling the self until it splits, Doyle has penned a peeling, serpentine novel for an age of shed certainties – THOMAS MCMULLAN, author of Groundwater
Where I come from, when something is called mad it’s often a good thing. Rob Doyle’s new novel is very mad * RODDY DOYLE *
It takes a truly exceptional writer to throw around a term as aggressively pretentious as ‘quantum-auto-fiction’, then have the gall to actually pull it off. Unlike anything I’ve ever read. A portrait of the artist from every conceivable angle * LIAS SAOUDI *
Impressively fast-paced, Cameo asks timely questions about authorship and our responsibility for the stories we send out in the world … A meta extravaganza * HOT PRESS MAGAZINE *
Cameo is a unique and hilarious novel … a meta commentary on novels that cannot exist, with a series of destabilising Russian doll chapters that both summarise the outrageous content of Ren Duka’s novels while undermining notions of authorship and origin in a hilarious and genuinely subversive hall of mirrors. Through this, Duka becomes an emblematic man of history, engaging with all the major events of recent times, from climate protest to Chinese interference, from being captured by ISIS to being cancelled for misogyny, a dazzling performance that seeks to restore the experimental literary novel back to its subversive origins * JAMES MILLER *
Doyle uses a proliferation of alter egos to lampoon the autofiction genre … A genuinely ingenious and, as far as I know, original format … All of Doyle’s skills and virtues as a writer are on display here: his self-exposure, his interest in plumbing human depths, his instinct for a kind of comic-philosophical fiction, as comfortable with meditative aphorisms as it is with jagged riffs. But in this novel he’s also done something else: simultaneously surmounting and retiring a genre. The original intent of autofiction was to create a sense of “authenticity”, to reduce the artifice between writer and reader. By swamping this book with selves, Rob Doyle achieves something like the opposite, a suspension of belief, which allows the fiction to play even more freely * NEW STATESMAN *
Beneath all the hijinks, Rob Doyle’s purpose is deadly serious. For a generation reared on a sugar-rush diet of post-ironic pop culture, the respectable novel can look pretty creaky. Cameo is, in this sense, a remarkably successful attempt to forge a fictional mode that emulates the mythmaking swagger of hip-hop, upcycling those tired representational tropes with wit and flair. The result is terrific fun * TLS *
Dazzling and inventive … a deft satire about literary ambition * INDEPENDENT, Book of the Month *
Clever and compelling * RTÉ *
A stinging satire for our time, from an immensely gifted Irish writer * SUNDAY INDEPENDENT, Ones to Watch 2026 *
A fantasy of literary celebrity in the culture ware era … narrated in a winningly deadpan register caught between bewilderment and weariness. The matter-of-fact present-tense narration, sprightly with hyperbolic intensifiers … generates terrific momentum and the satire is wicked * THE GUARDIAN *
In a world where so many novels are carbon copies of other books, and the originals weren’t much good to begin with, Rob Doyle is someone to be grateful for … there simply isn’t another novelist writing with such personality, ingenuity and purpose * SUNDAY INDEPENDENT *
Cameo is a brave and risky enterprise … its intelligence and ambition mark Doyle out as one of the most enduringly distinctive voices in contemporary Irish fiction * IRISH TIMES *
Buckle-up - Doyle’s latest novel is a hall of mirrors style self-referential literary satire … Doyle pushes at both tone and content with an almost infantile glee * DAILY MAIL *
A heady cocktail … genuinely scintillating * MAIL ON SUNDAY *

Rob Doyle is the author of four internationally acclaimed books: Autobibliography, Threshold, This is the Ritual, and Here Are the Young Men which was adapted as a film starring Anya Taylor-Joy and Dean-Charles Chapman, and was named as one of Hot Press magazine’s ‘20 Greatest Irish Novels 1916-2016’. Doyle’s writing has appeared in the New York Times, Observer, TLS, Dublin Review, and many other publications, and his work has been translated into several languages. He is the editor of an anthology published by Dalkey Archive Press, The Other Irish Tradition, and the book In This Skull Hotel Where I Never Sleep.

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