Hugo Hamilton

The 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...

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...

The starting point for this book is Evelyn Hofer's 'Dublin: A Portrait', which enjoyed great popularity upon its original publication in 1967, and featured an in-depth essay by the well-known British critic and memoirist V.S. Pritchett. 'Dublin: A Portrait' is an example of Evelyn Hofer's (1922-2009) perhaps most important body of work, namely her city portraits--books that present comprehensive prose texts by renowned authors alongside her self-contained...