Carlo Gébler

No One Tells You -The Last Years of Edna O’Brien, Carlo Gébler, in conservation with Dermot Bolger

Carlo Gébler is a novelist, memoirist and son of the late, great writer Edna O’Brien. In conversation with Dermot Bolger he discusses his new book,No One Tells You, which confronts the realities of old age – pain, confusion, hospitals, carers, the battle to keep writing – as the world that Edna O’Brien built through language begins to contract. A confrontation with mortality, Gébler’s book asks what remains when independence vanishes and the child becomes the witness to a parent’s slow decline.

Dermot Bolger is a Dublin born novelist, poet and playwright whose fifteen novels include The Family on Paradise Pier, The Lonely Sea and Sky, and most recently, Hide Away. His many plays include Last Orders at the Dockside and an adaptation of Ulysses, both staged by the Abbey Theatre. As a factory worker in Finglas in the late 1970s he founded the Raven Arts Press which later became New Island Books. His latest book of short fiction, Imperfect Beings, was published in May 2026.