“When you’re in a gang, you feel strong in your tummy. You run and shout and everyone else is afraid. But they don’t want me any more because I’m a dreamer [...].”

Dimitra tagged me in a meme, where I had to post lines 6, 7 and 8 of page 123 of the book that’s closest to me. I tend to wander around the flat rather a lot, so that book changes several times a minute, but at that very moment it was Hugo Hamilton’s The Speckled People, which after a short break I finished this week. It’s one of these books that makes you sad after you have finished it; not because of an unfinished story, but because it is so beautifully written and reading it had been such a pleasure.

I picked it up from the local library, after I had seen it being recommended by Rachel Seiffert. It does fit well in that list of books about troubled families, for it is about growing up with a father whose apparent well-meaningness is disguised by physical violence against his children and a mother who had a troubled past, even compared to the circumstances of Nazi Germany. But the book, a true memoir of Hamilton’s youth in 1950s and 1960s Ireland, lacks self-pity or a cynical world view. Rather, it is a sweet and well-written story of the common and slightly less common things that happened to the Hamilton family. I’ve read a fair number of Irish books recently –and just started another one– but this one I enjoyed the most, by far.