Rob Doyle’s Cameo is a bibliographic comedy, written in the tradition of Jorge Luis Borges’s fictional literary essay ‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote’ (1939) and Roberto Bolaño’s encyclopedia Nazi Literature in the Americas (1996). It comprises a sequence of twenty-three quasi-academic synopses of novels about a middle-aged novelist named Ren Duka. The first, Ren Duka’s Seen a Few Things, is a runaway success that catapults its unnamed author to ‘bestselling ubiquity’. From there, the writer starts crafting sequels with a view to cashing in on the latest literary and cultural fashions. These subsequent instalments include a mix of genres and subjects, from contemplative nature writing (Ren Duka’s Blues) to ‘time-travel caper’ (Ren Duka in the Third Reich) to ‘geopolitical thriller’ (Ren Duka in the Caliphate).

The summaries are interspersed with excerpts from the author’s memoir, A Cool, Dry Place, as well as a novel written by Duka himself, Night Taxi, a dystopian thriller set in Dublin in the near future. Alongside these are written, oral or mental confessions from other characters, including the heroin-addicted punk