Conversation with the Sea

Hugo Hamilton is the best-selling author of The Speckled People, a memoir of his German-Irish childhood in Dublin, growing up with his German mother and prohibited by his revolutionary Irish father from speaking English. It was translated into twenty languages and adapted for stage at the Gate Theatre. He has published ten novels including Dublin Palms and The Pages, a collection of short stories, and a second memoir The Sailor in the Wardrobe. His stories have appeared in the New Yorker. He has won numerous literary awards for his work including the Prix Femina in France and the Bundesverdienstkreuz order of merit, awarded by the German state for his exploration of cultural diversity. Hamilton is a member of Aosdána and lives in Dublin.

I don't think I've ever read a book as wise, or as moving. It's replete with images that I know will stay with me forever: the red dots; the motorcycling couple; the pink-jacketed U-bahn man; the flung suitcases; the women on the truck; and Lukas's almost ghostly, liminal presence in his own story, as he tries and tries to give coherence to the inchoate; to work his grief and trauma into some kind of resolution. His pain and his yearning lift up from every line, and what lines they are. This is a book of Everything: love, family, home, war, migration, loss; at once and by turns gentle and ferocious, luminous and dark, and ultimately filled with hope. I feel changed by this novel, and I will treasure it forever.