A Star Called Henry-Signed Advance Unc. proof

Roddy Doyle

ISBN 10: 0141800828 / ISBN 13: 9780141800820

Published by Viking, NY, 1999

About this Item

Viking, NY, 1999, 344 pgs. First thus Advance Uncorrected Proofs in Near Fine condition with just a bit of shelfwear. The Author has Signed on the ffep. Also An Autographed Copy sticker is affixed to front. Doyle is the winner of the Booker Prize. "An epic, a love story, and a portrait of Irish history.". All books bubble wrapped and shipped promptly in a box.

Seller Inventory # 0103543

Bibliographic Details

• Title: A Star Called Henry-Signed Advance Unc. proof
• Publisher: Viking, NY
• Publication Date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0141800828
• ISBN 13: 9780141800820
• Binding: Wraps
• Edition: First-Advance Uncorrected Proofs.
• Condition: Near Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: NA
• Signed: Signed by Author(s)
• Seller catalogs:
  • Modern Fiction
  • Historical Fiction

About this title

Synopsis

Offers a portrait of an adventuresome Irishman named Henry Smart, an IRA assassin and 1916 Easter Rebellion fighter, from his Dublin birth to his adulthood, when he becomes the father of a young rebel.

Review

The habit of murder becomes a hard one to break; the hero of Roddy Doyle's novel of the Irish War of Independence, like his father before him, kills to order and kills in cold blood. Where his father was simply the one-legged bouncer at a brothel, whose employers used him for any killing that needs to be done, Henry has motives. Growing up on the street, taught his letters by James Connolly, he believes in not just Irish freedom, but workers' revolution. He learns the hard way that his pious middle-class masters do not have this in mind.

A Star Called Henry--passionate, angry, darkly and wildly comic--has something in it to offend everybody. His stirring, deeply anti-romantic, account of the siege of the Dublin Post Office during the Easter Rising is remarkable, but hardly less so is his account of life on the Dublin docks, or Henry's treks around the countryside as one of Michael Collins' hard men, teaching guerrilla warfare to dairy farmers and clerks. The love affair between Henry and his equally blood-thirsty teacher and wife Miss O'Shea is sweet and touching. The first volume of a trilogy, this is a radical departure for Doyle, and a stunning success. --Roz Kaveney, Amazon.co.uk