Stranger at Home

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, this latest offering from one of Ireland’s best-selling authors (his memoir The Speckled People, his five novels) is sure to sell in very large numbers. Whereas Heinrich Böll visited St. Patrick’s Cathedral, a bank manager’s home in Mayo, the streets and shops of Limerick and the lighthouse on Clare Island, Hugo Hamilton visits the deserted village on Achill Island, Croke Park in Dublin, a barbershop in Limerick, Turlough Park House in County Mayo, a police station in Prague, the church on Clare Island and a classroom in Bucharest.