No Greater Love by David Butler

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No Greater Love: A short story collection by David Butler
£~~11.99~~ £8.49 UK inc. pp
Release date: June 2013


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‘Out of the crooked timbre of humanity nothing straight was ever made.’ So wrote Immanuel Kant, and it might serve as an epigraph for No Greater Love, a collection of stories dealing with human nature in all its imperfections. In the title story, which won the Maria Edgeworth Award, a woman serves a life-sentence for the murder of her daughter. In others, a child goes missing; a bride to be is betrayed by a friend; a bizarre series of corpses show up mysteriously in Dublin over a summer; a sex offender moves to a small town; a girl is almost caught shoplifting and is persecuted by the security guard’s eyes; a man attends the funeral of a father he has come to hate; and, in a story that was short-listed for the prestigious Bridport Prize last year, a woman tries to come to terms with brutal rape. Dark territory indeed, and yet, as the title suggests, the collection is also an exploration of love, in all its guises, and is relieved throughout with dark laughter.

Previous Works

His first novel The Last European was published in 2005 (Wynkin de Worde, Galway), while his debut poetry collection Via Crucis (Doghouse, Tralee) appeared in 2011. A second novel The Judas Kiss was published in 2012 by New Island Press (Dublin), who have also accepted his third novel,'City of Dis' for publication in 2014. His play 'Twas the Night Before Xmas' has recently been short-listed for the Scottish Community Drama Awards 2012/13.

Other publications to date include An Aid to Reading Ulysses (James Joyce Centre / Dublin City Libraries, 2004) and a book of translations from the Portuguese, Selected Pessoa (Dedalus Press, 2004). He is at present hooked on the theatre, and has lived in Bray since 2005.

About the author

David Butler was born and raised in Dublin. He attended Belvedere College, took degrees in Engineering (UCD) and Spanish (Essex) and a PhD in Latin American Literature (TCD). He has taught or lectured in the Seychelles, Australia, Spain, the UK, and Venezuela. Since returning to Ireland after a ten years odyssey, David has worked as Education Officer at the James Joyce Centre, has taught a number of creative writing courses, and has lectured in Spanish Literature at TCD, Essex University, Carlow College and UCD.