Dublin Palms

The palm trees give the street a holiday atmosphere. There must be something in the soil they like. They have straight leaves that get a bit ragged, with split ends. At night you hear them rattling in the wind.

The narrator of Dublin Palms has returned to Dublin to set up home with his partner Helen and their two children. Their lives are filled with optimism, but also a sense of dislocation. Overshadowed by the Troubles in the North, their family enterprise begins to come apart. As the creditors line up to be paid, they must consider leaving everything behind. What will they gain when they stand to lose all?

In this spectacular novel from the author of The Speckled People, a family tries to hold on in a falling world. It is a powerful story of fragmentation and belonging, of emigrants and people returning home.

Reviews

Praise for Dublin Palms:

‘A gorgeous, richly atmospheric, engrossing novel about family, voice, and what it means to find yourself lost in everywhere that should be home. Deserves your full attention’ Rick O’Shea

Praise for The Speckled People:

'This is the most gripping book I've read in ages. And it's beautifully written: what could have been safe memories are made new-lived and real in this fascinating, disturbing and often very funny memoir’ Roddy Doyle

'The Speckled People is poetic in its language and construction, lyrical in so many of its descriptions. There is a story full of several different kinds of passion with a real tragedy at its heart. The pain is all there, but so is its antidote’
Margaret Forster

'Donner und Blitzen! What the Jaysus! A memoir of warmth and wisdom. And at last a good – if flawed – Irish father. A beautiful German mother. And not too much rain. It is tender and profound and, best of all, tells the truth. I loved it.'
Patrick McCabe

'A fine and timely book from an exquisitely gifted writer, this is beautiful, subtle, unflashy, perfectly realised and quite extraordinarily powerful.'
Joseph O'Connor

About the author

Hugo Hamilton is the author of a bestselling memoir, The Speckled People, the story of his German-Irish childhood in Dublin, where he was prohibited by his revolutionary father from speaking English. He has written nine novels, two memoirs, a collection of short stories and three stage plays. His work has won international awards, including the French Prix Femina étranger, the Italian premio Giuseppe Berto and DAAD scholarship in Berlin. Hamilton is a member of Aosdána and lives in Dublin.