Synopses & Reviews
Snow is falling over Dublin. It is almost midnight on New Year's Eve, 1959. On the rooftop of 44 Seville Place, ten-year-old Peter Sheridan clings to the steel rod of a television antenna. When his father urges him to turn the antenna toward England, the boy reaches up, and pictures from a foreign place beam into their living room. Life in the Sheridan family will never be the same again.
Thus begins an astonishing portrait of a Dublin family as they chart their way through the turbulent 1960s, experiencing sex, music, loss, survival, drugs, the Troubles in Belfast, and the seductive power of the theater. In this honest, sharp-witted, and compassionate memoir, we become members of this loving family as we explore the Dublin that shaped young Peter Sheridan.
Review
"Peter Sheridan has remade the lost world of sixties Dublin in this knock-out memoir, a gently powerful act of memory and love. It may be the end of a ubtful century, but it can at least be said that great books are being written. Here's one of them." Sebastian Barry
Review
"Seldom has the blossoming of artistic passion been so effectively captured...it will get into your brain and your blood and stay there a long time." San Francisco Chronicle
Review
"Peter Sheridan writes at the crossroads where hilarity and heartbreak, tenderness and savagery meet. The people who live there are often cruel, often magnificent, and always, always human. He captures them perfectly." Roddy Doyle, author of Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha and A Star Called Henry
Review
"...[A] loving and honest memoir....Sheridan's story has the freshness of the youth about which he is writing....[The book] has all the sharpness, disarming honesty and acceptance of sadness that seem hallmarks of Irish literature." Book Magazine
Review
"Dublin has rarely come to life as it does in Peter Sheridan's memoir. It has the breadth of great fiction and the truth of great autobiography. His prose is as rich as his characters, ordinary and fabulous, tragic and hilarious." Neil Jordan
Synopsis
"Sharp, jazzy, hilarious, and often painful....You'll rejoice in this wild song of a book." Frank McCourt