Hugo Hamilton, the internationally acclaimed author of ‘The Speckled People’ and ‘Sailor in the Wardrobe’, turns his hand back to fiction with a compelling drama tracing Berlin's central historical importance throughout the twentieth century.1945. At the end of the second world war in Berlin, a young mother loses her two-year-old boy in the bombings. She flees to the south, where her father finds a young foundling of the same age among the refugee trains to replace the boy. He makes her promise...
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.The narrator of Dublin Palms has returned to Dublin to set up home with his partner Helen and their two children. Their lives are filled with optimism, but also a sense of dislocation. Overshadowed by the Troubles in the North, their family enterprise begins to come apart. As the creditors...
‘Not only haunted by death, but also by beauty and the strangeness of being alive. A deeply memorable novel’ Colm Tóibín‘… I have friends and family, I am in this wonderful country, I have money, there is nothing much wrong with me except I am dying.’Úna has little over a week left to live and wants to see Berlin for the first and last time. Her friend Liam accompanies her. As the city streets open up to them, so too do their pasts. Úna recalls her life – her lovers, her famous father, her...
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...
In this remarkable book, Hugo Hamilton tells the story of individuals caught up in the turbulent last days of World War II.Stationed in Czechoslovakia, lovers Bertha Sommer and Officer Franz Kern long to escape from the war and its consequences, but they are trapped between the advancing Red Army and the fear of their own system, which punishes desertion with death.Meanwhile, an American contemporary, living in Germany, sets out on a mission to find the exact location of the last shot fired in...
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...
‘This is the most gripping book I've read in ages … It is beautifully written, fascinating, disturbing and often very funny.’ Roddy DoyleThe childhood world of Hugo Hamilton, born and brought up in Dublin, is a confused place. His father, a sometimes brutal Irish nationalist, demands his children speak Gaelic, while his mother, a softly spoken German emigrant who has been marked by the Nazi past, speaks to them in German. He himself wants to speak English. English is, after all, what the other...
