CYRIL’S LOTTERY OF LIFE depicts bizarre and comic events with a sexual undertone centred on an unconventional English lawyer’s practice and his colourful and wacky clients.
Alphabet fetishes and phobias, a terminal desk-top adventure, an investigation into mysterious anonymous messages, a secretary secretly in love with her boss, an overload of cholesterol-filled kosher food, a chief superintendent whose blow-up doll makes a dramatic public appearance, a bottle fed judge who nightly retires to bed in a nappy and babygro and Cyril Braithwaite, fretting that most of his legal cases relate to his clients’ private parts, all contribute to an absorbing, fast moving, hilarious legal tale.
Alan Shatter lives most of the time in Dublin, Ireland, with his wife Carol. For some time each year they live in Marco Island, Florida. He is a retired Irish politician, a former Irish minister for Justice, Equality and Defence, a political commentator, lawyer and author. He is the author over three decades of four major books on Irish family law that substantially contributed to its modernisation and reform. He is also the author of Family Planning Irish Style (1979), a satire on past Irish family planning laws and Laura (Poolbeg, 1989) a best-selling novel that told the story of the heart rendering conflict over a child between the child’s unmarried birth mother and potential adopters. His two most recent best-selling books are biographies Life is a Funny Business (Poolbeg, 2017) and Frenzy & Betrayal (Merrion Press, 2019). In this, his first comedic novel, he utilises his thirty-five years of surreal experiences as a practicing family lawyer to create an unforgettable group of quirky and idiosyncratic characters and uses their trials and tribulations as a vehicle for his very distinctive humour. He was recently quoted saying that ‘Throughout my life I have spent far too much time immersed in the serious stuff trying to save the world. Knowing that life can be both funny and absurd I am now focused on having some fun, celebrating absurdity, and spreading the laughter.’