The Star Factory. This item is unavailable.The Star Factory

The Star Factory of the title was an abandoned mill, full of Piranesian galleries and rusting machinery, which haunted the author as a child; roads converge on Belfast to form a stellar patter, in an ironic benediction of the city's sectarian divisions. But the Star factory is also a place of the imagination, where history and decaying architecture are turned into stories. And this is a book about growing up in a city that is full of stories, waeving in and out of each other as Carson explores myriad cities of his native town, diving down "the wormhole of memory" into parallel worlds where religion, politics and the sad magic of the dying shipyards and linen factories take manifold forms.

Ciaran Carson is an acclaimed poet and novelist and has been awarded the Irish Times Irish Literature Prize, the T. S. Eliot Poetry Prize and the Forward Poetry Prize for best collection, as well as the Yorkshire Post Prize for The Star Factory, published by Granta Books. His translation of The Inferno of Dante Alighieri was awarded the Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize. He lives in Belfast.