ISBN 0-312-85872-8 (US hbk, 1995),,, 0-312-86287-3 (US pbk, 1997)

"One day, an attractive young woman strolls into the office of therapist John Donnelly and tells him a story. She says she has been left on Earth by an alien race called the Holock and if, in the space of one year, she can convince one person of her story -- and she has chosen him -- she will be permitted to stay. Then she calmly unfastens her blouse and displays her breasts: she has square nipples." --Peter Crowther (in Interzone 109 , July 1996).

"So begins the wildest SF novel since the passing of Philip K.Dick. Patrick O'Leary's Door Number Three is a constant wellspring of surprise and wonder, a novel about a young man of today and a woman from somewhere else who is out to love or kill him -- or both. The whole, apparently real, world and everything in it can never be the same again." [from the jacket blurb, US hbk, December 1995]

"At last year's Armadillocon, editor David Hartwell said he had been working with O'Leary for nearly a decade to get this novel into shape. It shows. Door Number Three is one of the most strikingly original and well written first novels in recent memory...." --Lawrence Person (in Nova Express , Vol.4, No.2, 1996).

"I actually don't recall when I started Door Number Three . I think it was sometime in 1988. I remember writing a page or two in a notebook with a blue felt tip pen." --Patrick O'Leary (in SF Eye , Issue #15, Fall 1997).

"Clever, well-written, and boldly original, O'Leary's Door Number Three elicits one of the rarest (and highest) pieces of praise that can be bestowed on a science fiction novel in the 1990s: It's unlike anything you've ever read before." --Lawrence Person (in Nova Express , Vol.4, No.2, 1996).

"Just when you thought nothing new could be done with time travel, lucid dreaming, alien abduction, shapeshifting, and World War III, along comes Patrick O'Leary, fusing them into a grand, sardonic comedy of consensual reality gone awry. Read Door Number Three while you still have the mind it is guaranteed to blow." --James Morrow.

"A highly appealing mix of skilled writing and zany imaginings, this novel bears positive comparison not only to the work of Philip K.Dick but also to the earlier SF of Kurt Vonnegut." -- (in Publishers Weekly ).

"It might well be the best SF novel of the past year....It's a rare book that can be comic and serious, thoughtful and gripping, all at once. Rarer still that such a book is as good as Door Number Three ." -- (in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction ).

"Door Number Three is Mr. O'Leary's first novel. His voice is fresh and funny, and he is bold enough to offer this assessment of the human condition as seen from a therapist's perspective: 'The only terror that heals: the terror of being ourselves. How we suffer to avoid it'." -- (in The New York Times ).

"A first novel, Door Number Three is ambitious nearly to a fault, tackling such thorny issues as time paradoxes, family guilt, and the true nature of dreams. O'Leary succeeds in keeping all these balls in the air and even manages to catch them all without a fumble at the novel's end. Funny and moving, Door Number Three seems to be a harbinger of a distinctive new voice in the field." -- (in The San Francisco Chronicle ).

"Slapstick and searingly truthful (often at the same time), funny and wise and thought-provoking and compulsively readable. Once you step through Door Number Three things will never look quite the same again." --Lisa Goldstein.

"Door Number Three swings open on an alternate reality, just off this one, pulsing with viridescent mystery in the form of something like green Jell-O and hinting at an oppressive, dream-free future. It also has amusing stuff to say about mother-son relationships, therapist-client interactions, and the righteousness of a St. Louis cardinal named Imish (a bird, not a ballplayer) as both house pet and highway pilot. O'Leary writes brightly, disarmingly, and well. He has an exciting future in the SF field, and the SF field has an exciting future because O'Leary does." --Michael Bishop.

"Everything you've ever suspected about psychotherapists. And what you really didn't want to know about getting romantically involved with aliens. A good and unusual book. I'm truly impressed." --Henry W.Targowski (in Mark/Space , January 1997).

Highly recommended.

• Books by Patrick O'Leary