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On his first trip abroad, Adrian Kenny observes that the signs are in one language only. There is no need for translation: there is nothing behind. Not so in his suburban childhood and adolescence, where Mayo is behind Dublin, poor fields behind bourgeois drawing rooms, wildness behind authority. Attached to both, his attempts to reconcile them take him from close certainty to total collapse in the year of change – America 1968.

“What was it all for?” his father asks. “It’s like the end of the Aeneid,” whispers his friend. “You came at the end of that world,” Father Wilmot says. The end of Latin Mass, maids, floggings and charcoal suits.

First published in 1991, Lilliput is proud to reissue this portrayal of a generation, to which the author’s keen eye and clear style lend the truth and elegance of a classic.

More Information
ISBN/EAN 9781843517108
Author Adrian Kenny
Publisher Lilliput Press
Publication date 12 May 2017
Format Paperback
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Before the Wax Hardened

A revised edition of the remarkable memoir, first published in 1991, which follows Kenny as a child in Mayo, through his adolescence in Dublin and his life in the United States. Kenny's keen eye, wickedly accurate ear and his deceptively simple portrayal of growth of sensibility has the truth and elegance of a classic.

'He brings maturity to bear on the past, without making a parable of it. Most of all he makes the past seem as it really is, swimming about inside us. This is a great book altogether.'      The Irish Times.

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