Obama endorsement strikes gold for Cork-born author

CELEBRITY endorsement doesn’t come much better than this.

The ‘Obama book bump’ has struck gold for Cork-born author Joseph O’Neill following a glowing review of his acclaimed novel Netherland from the US commander-in-chief.

In an interview for the upcoming issue of the New York Times magazine, the president said he had grown tired of briefing books, and has been spending his evenings with O’Neill’s novel – the first non-business reading he’s allowed himself since Inauguration Day.

Kate Runde, spokesperson for Vintage & Anchor Books in New York, said the novel, which was scheduled to be published in paperback in June, was instead put on shelves yesterday.

According to Ms Runde, sales of the hardback have jumped by 40% in the last week – and the book’s Amazon ranking has soared.

Vintage Books, she said, will start by printing an additional 70,000 copies.

O’Neill’s third novel, for which he received the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award, tells the story of Hans van den Broek, a Dutch financial analyst living in lower Manhattan who grows increasingly alienated from his wife following the September 11 attacks.

Likened by reviewers to the Great Gatsby, the story unfolds with the main character spending a summer alone in New York and striking up a friendship with a wily Trinidadian businessman who helps Hans rediscover his childhood love of cricket.

The son of a Turkish mother and an Irish father, O’Neill was born in the Bon Secours Hospital, Cork in 1964. When he was 10 he learned both of his late grandfathers were imprisoned during WWII.

In his first and only non-fiction book, Blood-Dark Track, the quest to determine whether his IRA-soldier grandfather was a murderer and his Turkish grandfather, a hotelier, was an Axis spy took the author from Co Cork to the coast of Turkey.