EmbarkPaperback, 24 February 2023

Embark is a monumental piece of work: this is O'Brien in his late, Audenesque, hyper-authoritative mode, and the collection has a number of straight-to-the-anthology pieces about mortality, history and culture - steeped, as usual, with great and grim humor, wonderful music and the kind of literate and culturally informed wisdom that is increasingly rare in these deeply thick times.