Rickard Velily is an Irishman in New York, on the cusp of middle age and in flight from lost love and ageing parents. By way of a shabby-grand club for such struggling diasporic exiles as he soon finds himself to be, he meets two older, even more washed-up characters, and with them proposes to reclaim the mantle of heroic Irish tenor singing (in the manner of Josef Locke, or Count McCormack), suffused by “long-gone romantic days of muzzle-loading firearms and symbolic bitterns”. They soon find themselves drawn into a confusing (or perhaps merely confused) struggle between the Shee (the Fairies, Little People, or what you will) mediated by a grindingly with-it tech giant (Puffball Computers, no prizes for guessing the real-world analogue) on one side and, as far as I could tell