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An exquisite new edition of this timeless and heartbreaking autobiography by John McGahern, described by Hilary Mantel as ‘a glowing masterpiece’.
John McGahern is one of the most influential Irish writers of the latter half of the twentieth century.
Published a year before his death in 2006, Memoir is a moving account of McGahern’s life and in particular his childhood in rural Ireland in the 1940s and 1950s. McGahern’s book, as Sean O’Hagan wrote in the Guardian, is ‘a work of personal testimony that brims with remembered detail, and possesses an emotional intensity that, in places, is almost overwhelming’.
The cover panels of this new edition feature artwork by Charles Shearer – an artist and printmaker who has made annual visits to Ireland for the past quarter-century.
Memoir has been printed on premium wood-free paper using the traditional lithographic method on a small Heidelberg press. Each book is sewn and bound by hand, using a quarter-bound case of real cloth and printed panels front and back.
Born in 1934, John McGahern was the eldest of seven children, raised on a farm in the West of Ireland. The son of a Garda sergeant who had served as an IRA volunteer in the Irish War of Independence, he was devastated by his mother’s death when he was nine. An outstanding student, McGahern studied at University College Dublin and…
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