Bøger af 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.

"We wear Aran Sweaters and Lederhosen. We are forbidden from speaking English. We are trapped in a language war. We are the Speckled People." In one of the most original memoirs to emerge in years, Hugo Hamilton tells the haunting story of his German-Irish childhood in 1950s Dublin. His Gaelic-speaking, Irish nationalist father rules the home with tyranny, while his German-speaking mother rescues her children with cakes and stories of her own struggle against Nazi Germany. Out on the streets of Dublin is another country, where they are taunted as Nazis and subjected to a mock Nuremberg trial. Through the eyes of a child, this rare and shockingly honest book gradually makes sense of family, language, and identity, unlocking at last the secrets that his parents kept in the wardrobe.

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.

'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 children in Dublin speak. English is what they use when they hunt him down in the streets and dub him Eichmann, as they bring him to trial and sentence him to death at a mock seaside court.Out of this fear and guilt and often comical cultural entanglements, he tries to understand the differences between Irish history and German history and turn the twisted logic of what he is told into truth. It is a journey that ends in liberation, but not before he uncovers the long-buried secrets that lie at the bottom of his parents wardrobe.In one of the finest books to have emerged from Ireland in many years, the acclaimed novelist Hugo Hamilton has finally written his own story - a deeply moving memoir about a whole family's homesickness for a country they can call their own.

Two mad, funny and unpredictable stories in one volume, from master storyteller Hugo Hamilton.

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.