Paul Kilduff Virtual Tour
Author Paul Kilduff will be joining us here on Fiction Scribe tomorrow with a guest post as part of his virtual tour with his book Ruinair. Before he stops by, I thought you would like to get to know him (and his book) a little better.
Paul Kilduff was born in Dublin, Ireland, graduated from University College Dublin with a Bachelor of Commerce degree in 1985 and later qualified as a Chartered Accountant. He moved to London in 1989 and spent six years working in the City of London.
He returned to live in Dublin in 1995. He began writing fiction in 1996 and finished his first novel in 1998. Square Mile was published in 1999, The Dealer in 2000, The Frontrunner in 2001 and The Headhunter in 2003, which were published by Hodder & Stoughton in London and by Muelenhoff in The Netherlands.
He decided to write a travel book a couple of years ago and was extremely fortunate shortly afterwards to be abandoned in Malaga airport for ten hours, where he had the germ of an idea for Ruinair - an epic tale of human endurance on Europe’s low fares airlines. Ruinair was published in February 2008 by Gill & Macmillan Ireland and entered the Irish non fiction bestseller list at no 1 where it has spent 6 weeks to date.
About Ruinair:
Stung by a ten hour delay and a €300 fare to Spain on his native ‘low fares’ airline, Dubliner Paul Kilduff plots revenge - to fly to every country in Europe for the same total outlay, suffering every low fares airline indignity. Armed with no more than 10kg of carry-on baggage, he endures 6 am departures, Six Nations boarding scrums, lengthy bus excursions, terminal anxiety and cabin crew who deliver infamous customer service.
Kilduff travels to places he never knew he wanted to go that are probably not quite where he thinks they are and he is not sure what he will do once he gets there, including beautiful Beauvais, cosmopolitan Charleroi, electric Eindhoven, heavenly Haugesund and tropical Tampere.
And all this on a cheap Irish airline led by a self-proclaimed ‘obnoxious little bollocks‘, which flies from A to somewhere remotely near B, weighs baggage like gold, charges its passengers to check-in or for wheelchairs, sells them hangover cures and scratch cards, lands its aircraft at the wrong airport, takes court cases against its own pilots and doesn’t even care if Kilduff shows up. On his miserly pan-European exploration he reveals the secrets of the new travel phenomenon favoured by one hundred million plus passengers annually.
And his advice to fellow travellers in the ultimate airport holiday book? - “Don’t get mad, get even - Get a one cent airline ticket.”
Paul’s book has enjoyed number one non-fiction bestselling success in its first seven weeks of publication and continues to sell strongly.
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