Jarleth Prendergast is an ex-pat Irishman, an aging punk rocker, a film snob, a copy-shop employee, a dime-store intellectual, and a truly desperate man. His marriage is in tatters and his career as an avantgarde claymation artist is heading nowhere. As the book opens, Jarleth receives a letter from Irish lawyer Sean Reynolds about a possible inheritance from his Aunt Lucy, and promptly falls into fits of delusion as hilarious as they are utterly pathetic. Certain beyond reason that this "cash fuel injection" will turn his life around and casting himself in heroic and sentimental cliché of the cinema, Jarleth enters on a course of rampant self-destruction, narrating it all in his head to his new best friend: Sean, the Irish lawyer.

Mr. Dynamite is an extraordinary first novel that melds an Irish writer's high style and penchant for belly laughs with the grotesque smash-and-grab energy of pre-9/11 New York, making for a mad, sad, and profoundly funny book.