Patrick Moloney's Ulysses Uncovered is a masterful summary, guide and commentary to James Joyce's great epic. Chapter by chapter Moloney's book extracts the narrative from Ulysses and tells you the story of the many characters, real and imaginary that wandered the streets of Dublin on that unforgettable day of June 16th 1904. More than that the book is bursting with commentary and it is full of explanations.
It is acknowledged that readers of Joyce's work fall into one of two categories: the few who have struggled and succeeded to read Ulysses completely, and the many that have started and have not yet finished it. This is where Ulysses Uncovered comes in. Each of its eighteen chapters (matching the eighteen chapters, or episodes, of Ulysses) is very readable and the information is satisfyingly accessible. Ulysses Uncovered is a very purposeful book. It focuses on the reader wanting him/her to successfully complete the reading of one of the great books of the twentieth century.
Ulysses Uncovered will provoke your thinking in many ways and hopefully expand it to the point where you will develop your own independent views and opinions. Better still you will quickly come to see the wit, the sparkle and the musicality of Joyce's writing, and you will get to admire its brilliance and majesty.
The following is a comment from Ulick O'Connor, well-known intellectual figure in contemporary Irish affairs and best known for his biography of Oliver St. John Gogarty (1964), immortalised as Buck Mulligan in Ulysses:
I have read your 'Ulysses Uncovered'. I think it fills a gap. None of the other attempts to make Joyce's complicated work understandable have taken your approach which is to take the reader through the pages of the book and explain, as well as the classical references, the local ones too. There are a good number of aids to Joyce's Ulysses but I think this is the one that I so far find easiest to bring the reader close to what Joyce has done.