Cameo

Cameo is the life story of invented Irish novelist Ren Duka, who has unexpected, runaway international success with a prolific series of autofictional novels.

What begins as a playful satire on literary ambition and the chaos of our times expands into a dazzling, polyphonic odyssey that challenges the border between fiction and reality.

As the Ren Duka novels race outwards in widening circles of influence, we encounter Dina Tatangelo, cult novelist of the New York underworld; a Japanese manga artist whose work eerily affects his family life; a grizzled Dublin taxi driver who just might ferry his passengers between worlds; a film-star facing public disgrace; and Rob Doyle, an author enduring a psychic and ontological crisis.

Cameo is at once a metaphysical architecture of the imagination, a human comedy full of unruly passions, and a self-portrait across multiple dimensions.

Praise for Cameo:

“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. ‘Doyle-ian’? Don’t rule it out.” Benjamin Myers