This story about a battle over language and a defeat in 'the language wars' is also a victory for eloquent writing, crafty and cunning in its apparent simplicity.' - Hermione Lee, The Guardian It is a bold strategy, because it does so call Joyce to mind, but it pays off handsomely. (.) Gradually, what the child-narrator sees and hears begins to turn into what he knows and understands -secrets, conflicts, histories, beliefs. 'Hugo Hamilton's The Speckled People triumphantly avoids the Angela's Ashes style of sentimental nostalgia and victim claims, and stands up well in the mighty, unending competition for most memorable Irish life-story.'(T)his vivid, timely, moving and enthrallingly comic memoir (.) The Speckled People is about homesickness: his mother's for Germany, his father's for an unavailable Ireland and the writer's for a home and homeland of his own' - Michael Thompson-Noel, Financial Times.General information | review summaries | our review | links | about the authorī : an odd childhood recounted in unusual (and ultimately not entirely successful) style

In one of the finest books to have emerged from Ireland since Patrick McCabe’s THE BUTCHER BOY and Seamus Deane’s READING IN THE DARK, acclaimed novelist Hugo Hamilton has finally written his own story.Trying to meet all your book preview and review needs. It is a journey that ends in liberation but not before this little boy has uncovered the dark and long-buried secrets that lie at the bottom of his parents’ wardrobe. Out of this fear and confusion Hugo tries to build a balanced view of the world, to turn the twisted logic of what he is told into truth. English is what they use when they hunt down Hugo (or ‘Eichmann’ as they dub him) in the streets of Dublin, and English is what they use when they bring him to trial and execute him at a mock seaside court. English is, after all, what the other children in Dublin speak. The childhood world of Hugo Hamilton is a confused place: His father, a brutal Irish nationalist, demands his children speak Gaelic at home whilst his mother, a softly spoken German emigrant who escaped Nazi Germany at the beginning of the war, encourages them to speak German. A deeply moving memoir about a young boy growing up in Dublin and his family’s homesickness for a country they can call their own.

The speckled people by hugo hamilton