The Little Red Chairs was published by Faber and Faber in 2015, and it represents the most ambitious work of O’Brien’s late career — a novel that moves beyond the Irish subjects of her earlier fiction to engage with the great European catastrophe of the 1990s: the Bosnian War and the genocide at Srebrenica. The title refers to the 11,541 red chairs placed in the main street of Sarajevo in 2012 to commemorate the civilians killed during the siege — a real installation that O’Brien transforms into the governing image of her novel.
The story begins in Cloonoila, a fictional Irish town, where a mysterious stranger arrives — Dr. Vladimir Dragan, a tall, charismatic healer with a foreign accent and impressive credentials. The town is charmed: Dragan offers alternative therapies, listens sympathetically to people’s troubles, and begins an affair with Fiona, a married woman desperate for passion and meaning. O’Brien handles the seduction — of Fiona, and of the town — with masterly control, showing how charm and authority can overcome the moral instincts of people who ought to know better.
The revelation that Dragan is a war criminal — based on Karadžić, who hid in Belgrade for years as an alternative healer before his capture in 2008 — detonates the novel’s complacent world. Fiona, pregnant by Dragan, must confront what she has done; the town must confront its own willingness to be deceived; and the novel moves from Ireland to London to The Hague, following the consequences of the affair and the trial of the man who caused them.
O’Brien’s central insight is that evil operates through charm. Dragan is not a monster in any obvious sense — he is cultured, attentive, and genuinely healing in his medical practice. The horror is that the same man who heals individuals has ordered the murder of thousands, and that the gap between personal kindness and political atrocity is not a contradiction but a feature of how evil actually works in the world.
The novel was widely praised as O’Brien’s finest late work. At eighty-four, she had lost nothing of her ability to write prose of lyric intensity, and the expansion of her subject matter — from Irish domestic life to European history — demonstrated a creative ambition that few writers sustain into their ninth decade.
Collecting The Little Red Chairs
First edition (Faber and Faber, London, 2015): Cloth, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $15–$40
- American first (Little, Brown): $10–$25
- Later editions: $5–$10