O’DUFFY, Eimar. King Goshawk & The Birds.

London: Macmillan, 1926. First edition. Pictorial grey cloth. pp. ix, 319, 4. Small nick to dust jacket. Fine in near fine dust jacket.
First of O’Duffy’s Cuandine trilogy of novels. Described in the Dictionary of Irish Literature as his “major accomplishment … these books are a scathing, funny, and highly inventive satire of modern life … and embody a flamboyant range of ironic and rhetorical techniques that bear comparison to James Stephens, or Flann O’Brien, or, indeed, to James Joyce himself”.
Eimar Ultan O’Duffy (1893-1935) was born in Dublin and educated at Belvedere College, Stonyhurst College in Lancashire and at UCD. He and Bulmer Hobson caused disaster to the plans for the 1916 Easter Rising when they told Eoin MacNeill that the Rising was planned for the next week; MacNeill, nominal head of the Irish Volunteers, reacted by sending messengers around the country to call off the manoeuvres which were the cover for the Rising, and advertising in newspapers to cancel them.
A satirical novel published shortly after the author, disillusioned with revolutionary nationalism, emigrated from Ireland.

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