Time Pieces: A Dublin Memoir

Author(s): John Banville

Travel

For the young John Banville, Dublin was a place of enchantment and yearning. Each year, on his birthday - the 8th of December, Feast of the Immaculate Conception - he and his mother would journey by train to the capital city, passing frosted pink fields at dawn, to arrive at Westland Row and the beginning of a day's adventures that included much-anticipated trips to Clery's and the Palm Beach ice-cream parlour. The aspiring writer first came to live in the city when he was eighteen. In a once grand but now dilapidated flat in Upper Mount Street, he wrote and dreamed and hoped. It was a cold time, for society and for the individual - one the writer would later explore through the famed Benjamin Black protagonist Quirke - but underneath the seeming permafrost a thaw was setting in, and Ireland was beginning to change. Alternating between vignettes of Banville's own past, and present-day historical explorations of the city, Time Pieces is a vivid evocation of childhood and memory - that 'bright abyss' in which 'time's alchemy works' - and a tender and powerful ode to a formative time and place for the artist as a young man. Accompanied by images of the city by photographer Paul Joyce.

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Product Information

Banville is the greatest living master of simile and metaphor in prose, and Time Pieces is a trove of arresting imagery, from the lushly poetic to the luridly absurd ... [An] utterly delightful book' Irish Times

General Fields

  • : 9781473619043
  • : Hachette Books Ireland
  • : Hachette Books Ireland
  • : 0.586
  • : 01 October 2016
  • : 297mm X 212mm X 13mm
  • : Ireland
  • : 01 December 2016
  • : books

Special Fields

  • : 224
  • : 1612
  • : Hardback
  • : John Banville