Dolly Considine’s Hotel

Dolly Considine inherited the Curragh House Hotel in the 1950s when she was only 18, and ran it for thirty three years before she took on Julian Ryder (aka Paddy Butler) as a lounge assistant. He is an eighteen-year-old northside Dubliner aspiring to be a writer, who allowed his friend Johnner to talk him into selling his bullying (but absent) brother’s precious jazz record collection to finance their wild summer holiday away from Ireland. But the plans go awry when his brother announces he’s coming home. Julian goes to Busarus (bus station) in the hope of a miracle and finds one when a boy (Malone) newly arrived on the bus from Derry is arrested by detectives shortly after telling Julian he has a job interview at Dolly Considine’s famous hotel.

He is so surprised when Dolly appoints him that he invents a story (suggesting she is running a ‘safe house’ for IRA youth on the run) to make sense of her bizarre acceptance of him. And so he begins writing his “Summer of Unrequited Love” filled with fake news and featuring stories about living and dead guests, Dolly’s family, and other staff members. He makes enemies, but also becomes the object of desire for some of the hotel’s male and female guests, and while he sometimes capitulates, he also longs for Malone to come for him, so the two of them can walk off into the sunset, together. The story is mostly set in pre-Celtic Tiger Ireland during the summer of 1983 when the country is bitterly divided by referendum campaigns for and against a woman’s right to choose.