Other People's Countries: A Journey into Memory - Hardcover

McGuinness, Patrick

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0224098306 ISBN 13: 9780224098304

Publisher: Jonathan Cape, 2014

Synopsis

Winner of the 2014 Duff Cooper Prize
Winner of the 2015 Welsh Book of the Year Award
Shortlisted for the 2015 James Tait Black Memorial Prize
Shortlisted for the 2015 PEN Ackerley prize
Longlisted for the 2014 Thwaites Wainwright Prize


Disarming, eloquent and illuminating, this meditation on place, time and memory, could only have been written by a poet, or a novelist, or a professor. Happily, Patrick McGuinness is all three, and Other People's Countries is a marvel: a stunning piece of lyrical writing, rich in narrative and character – full of fresh ways of looking at how we grow up, how we start to make sense of the world.

This book evolved out of stories the author told his children: stories about the Belgian border town of Bouillon, where his mother came from, and where he has been going three times a year since he was a child – first with his parents and now with his son and daughter. This town of eccentrics, of charm, menace and wonder, is re-created beautifully – 'Most of my childhood,' he says, 'feels more real to me now than it did then'. For all its sharp specifics, though, this is a book about the common, universal concerns of childhood and the slowly developing deep sense of place that is the bedrock for our memories.

Alert and affectionate, full of great curiosity and humour, Other People's Countries has all the depth and complexity of its own subject – memory – and is an unfashionably distilled, resonant book: unusual and exquisite.

About this title

Review:

"McGuinness is a marvellous writer... On every page there are breathtakingly gorgeous images, similes, metaphors." (John Banville Observer)

"McGuinness has written the great book on Belgium and modern memory, or even Belgium and modern being. He takes his place among those singers and painters of the haunted, the melancholy, the diminished, the caricatural, the humdrum." (Michael Hofmann Guardian)

"Lyrical and evocative... This is a very Proustian memoir, whose effect will be to drive the reader into contemplation of their own half-forgotten childhood home." (Josh Glancy Sunday Times)

"A rich analysis of home and homelessness." (James Wood London Review of Books)

"This book had a powerful effect on me... Sometimes hilarious, sometimes freighted with tragedy." (Gillian Tindall Literary Review)

Book Description:

A very special book of short, Proustian pieces on childhood and how the places of our childhood are embedded in us.

Winner of the 2014 Duff Cooper Prize
Winner of the 2015 Welsh Book of the Year Award
Shortlisted for the 2015 James Tait Black Memorial Prize
Shortlisted for the 2015 PEN Ackerley prize
Longlisted for the 2014 Thwaites Wainwright Prize

About this edition

• Publisher: Jonathan Cape
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0224098306
• ISBN 13: 9780224098304
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 208