<div><p>Long before Dr. Fingal Flahertie O’Reilly made most readers’ acquaintance in Patrick Taylor’s bestselling novel<i>An Irish Country Doctor, </i>he appeared in a series of humorous columns originally published in<i>Stitches: The Journal of Medical Humour</i>.<i> </i>These warm and wryly amusing vignettes provide an early glimpse at the redoubtable Dr. O’Reilly as he tends to the colourful and eccentric residents of Ballybucklebo, a cozy Ulster village nestled in the bygone years of the early sixties.</p><p></p><p>Those seminal columns have been collected in <i>The Wily O’Reilly: Irish Country Stories</i>. In this convenient volume, Patrick Taylor’s legions of devoted fans can savor the enchanting origins of the Irish Country series . . . and newcomers to Ballybucklebo can meet O’Reilly for the very first time.</p><p>An ex-Navy boxing champion, classical scholar, crypto-philanthropist, widower, and hard-working general practitioner, Fingal Flahertie O’Reilly is crafty and cantankerous in these charming slices of rural Irish life. Whether he’s educating a naive man of the cloth in the facts of life, dealing with chronic hypochondriacs and malingerers, clashing with pigheaded colleagues, or raising a pint in the neighborhood pub, the wily O’Reilly knows a doctor’s work is never done, even if some of his “cures” can’t be found in any medical text! </p></div><div></div>