Compelling... You have to admire the stones it takes to set out his stall. But then, it's entirely in keeping with how he played.

Anyone interested in life coaching or self-awareness will be fascinated by O'Gara's revealing and unabashed self-analysis.

Adroitly constructed... his reflections on his recently concluded playing career contain enough cordite to remind one of the searing honesty and single-mindedness that drove this individual to perfection. Few escape his wrath.

A rollicking read... he speaks with naked emotion, raw candour, and even that rare commodity in sportsmen, forthrightness.

Revealing... Unguarded is a reflection on a playing career that saw him earn the respect of the rugby world and win almost all the game has to offer. Off the field, the Corkman was known for his phlegmatic pronouncements and this book is marked out by similar straight-talking.

A book that bristles with O'Gara's penchant for calling it as he sees it.

Amply researched and gracefully told

Sullivan has found the transcendent in the house

Bracingly eccentric…Sullivan is a remarkable writer

It's a good, funny, moving book... [Sullivan] is unfailingly good company, always curious, often very funny

Sullivan knows how to craft a paragraph and tell a story

Reads as what it is: a great first book

This morning Blood Horses showed up in the post. It’s Sullivan’s first book, a memoir about his late sportswriter father as well as a study of equine racing and breeding and obsessing over. We’re only 30 pages in but we’re convinced Sullivan wins it by a length and then some. He’s the best thing to come out of the south since 2 Chainz

A truly fascinating and brilliantly written memoir recounting Sullivan’s relationship with his writer father but also a detailed examination of horse racing, the love of his father’s life, as well as an entire treatise on the relationship between man and horse

Blood Horses blends history, reportage and personal essay. The book is an excellent example of the mixed form that the critic Northrop Frye once called an “anatomy”. [Sullivan’s] enthusiasm rubs off

Brilliant, sometimes maddeningly discursive memoir… Sullivan writes beautifully. Blood Horses makes better reading than the smoothly finished works of less witty and accomplished writers

All the elegance and craft [Sullivan] displayed in [Pulphead] are present once again

Luminous, hard-to-characterise book... By the sheer fizzing excellence of his writing [Sullivan] carries off the difficult task he set himself triumphantly

It’s a daring approach combining memoir and reportage and, beneath it all, the autobiographical theme of his attempt to understand his father, but it works magnificently

The prose is relaxed, the choice of material telling; it is once more a delight to be in his company