Bøker av Hugo Hamilton

Following in the footsteps of Nobel Laureate Heinrich Böll's 1956 classic Irish Journal, Hugo Hamilton revisits Boll's evocations of 18 places across the island to take stock of the changes that have occurred over the last seven decades in Ireland. Part travelogue, part memoir, part social commentary, and part comic masterpiece.

The palm trees give the street a holiday atmosphere. There must be something in the soil they like. They have straight leaves that get a bit ragged, with split ends. At night you hear them rattling in the wind.

You have a funny way of doing things here.The voice is that of Vid Cosic, a Serbian immigrant whose immediate friendship with a young Dublin lawyer, Kevin Concannon, is overshadowed by a violent incident in which a man is left for dead in the street one night. The legal fallout forces them into an ever closer, uncertain partnership, drawing Vid right into the Concannon family, working for them as a carpenter on a major renovation project and becoming more and more involved in their troubled family story.While he claims to have lost his own memory in a serious accident back home in Serbia, he cannot help investigating the emerging details of a young woman from Connemara who was denounced by the church and whose pregnant body was washed up on the Aran Islands many years ago. Was it murder or suicide? And what dark impact does this event in the past still have on the Concannon family now?As the deadly echo of hatred and violence begins to circle closer around them, Vid finds this spectacular Irish friendship coming under increasing threat with fatal consequences.Drawing his own speckled, Irish-German background, Hugo Hamilton has given us a highly compelling and original view of contemporary Ireland, the nature of welcome and the uneasy trespassing into a new country.

Adapted for the stage by the author, The Speckled People is a German-Irish memoir of growing up in Dublin during the 1950s. This family drama tells a profoundly moving story of a young boy trapped in a war of identity and language.

Following on from the success of 'The Speckled People', Hugo Hamilton's new memoir recounts the summer he spent working at a local harbour in Ireland, at a time of tremendous fear and mistrust.Young Hugo longs to be released from the confused identity he has inherited from his German mother and Irish father, but the backdrop of his mother's shame at the hands of Allied soldiers in the aftermath of the Second World War, along with his German cousin's mysterious disappearance somewhere on the Irish West Coast and the spiralling troubles in the north, seems determined to trap him in history. In an attempt to break free of his past, Hugo rebels against his father's strict and crusading regime and turns to the exciting new world of rock and roll, still a taboo subject in the family home.His job at the local harbour, rather than offering a welcome respite from his speckled world, entangles him in a bitter feud between two fishermen - one Catholic, one Protestant. Hugo listens to the missing persons bulletins going out on the radio for his German cousin, and watches the unfolding harbour duel end in drowning before he can finally escape the ropes of history.