Description
Temporarily out of stock
Title: Time Pieces: A Dublin Memoir
Author: BANVILLE JOHN
Illustrator: JOYCE PAUL
Format: HARDCOVER
Publication date: 20/10/2016
Imprint: HACHETTE IRELAND
Price: $49.99
Publishing status: Active
For the young John Banville, Dublin was a place of enchantment and yearning. Each year, on his birthday – the 8th of December, Feast of the Immaculate Conception – he and his mother would journey by train to the capital city, passing frosted pink fields at dawn, to arrive at Westland Row and the beginning of a day’s adventures that included much-anticipated trips to Clery’s and the Palm Beach ice-cream parlour. The aspiring writer first came to live in the city when he was eighteen. In a once grand but now dilapidated flat in Upper Mount Street, he wrote and dreamed and hoped. It was a cold time, for society and for the individual – one the writer would later explore through the famed Benjamin Black protagonist Quirke – but underneath the seeming permafrost a thaw was setting in, and Ireland was beginning to change. Alternating between vignettes of Banville’s own past, and present-day historical explorations of the city, Time Pieces is a vivid evocation of childhood and memory – that ‘bright abyss’ in which ‘time’s alchemy works’ – and a tender and powerful ode to a formative time and place for the artist as a young man.
Accompanied by images of the city by photographer Paul Joyce.
ISBN: 9781473619043
Pages: 224