44: A Dublin Memoir by Peter Sheridan

Snow is falling all over Dublin. It is half an hour to the start of the New Year. On the rooftop of 44 Seville Place, a ten-year-old boy clings to the steel pole of a television aerial. His father urges him to turn the aerial towards England. The boy reaches up and, in that moment, pictures from a foreign place beam into their home and change their lives forever.

Thus begins an astonishing portrait of a Dublin family as they chart their way through the turbulent waters of the 1960s. From the first page we are drawn into their lives and their relationships. We exult in their triumphs and we cry at their disasters, but at no time is laughter far from the surface. By the book's close, we are part of this extended family.

Peter Sheridan has written a brave book. In exploring his past with such honesty and compassion, he reveals the confused adolescent in us all. As he makes his journey from boy to man, he shows us an individual and a society on the cusp of profound change.

'You'd need a bag of adjectives to do justice to Peter Sheridan's superb book. He shows us the streets of Dublin, a place alive with characters, and a house teeming with vital Sheridans. The writing is brilliant because that's the way the Sheridans are; it's writing that matches the rhythms of backstreet Dublin; sharp, jazzy, hilarious and often painful.'
FRANK McCOURT