44

Snow is falling all over Dublin. It is half an hour to the start of the New Year. On the rooftop of 44 Seville Place, a 10-year-old boy clings to a television aerial. His father urges him to turn the aerial towards England. The boy reaches up and in that moment, pictures from a foreign place beam into their home and change their lives forever. Thus begins this astonishing portrait of a Dublin family as they chart their way through the turbulent waters of the l960s. We exult in their triumphs and cry at their disasters, but at no time is laughter far from the surface. As Peter Sheridan follows his journey from boy to man, he reveals the confused adolescent in us all and shows us an individual and a society on the cusp of profound change. 'A brilliantly realised, almost novelistic, portrait of an urban working-class Irish childhood ... remarkably honest, involving, compassionate' Scotsman 'A beautiful, touching, bittersweet account of inner-family life...A lively, turbulent and huge tale painted in vivid colour on a very simple canvas. I'm glad to have read it and so will you be.' Malachy McCourt, Observer