The Speckled People

This memoir of the childhood of the son of an Irish father and German mother is an impressionist masterpiece. Hamilton's book has a dark core but the stories and descriptions are intensively burnished so that the book is suffused by the light, smells and sounds of childhood. The past is often starkly immediate in these pages. In a similar but less experimental way than Joyce's Portrait of an Artist we are immersed in a child's understanding and this understanding grows as the book progresses.

"When you're small you know nothing."