A Star Called Henry (Signed First Edition)

Roddy Doyle

ISBN 10: 1568958188 / ISBN 13: 9781568958187

Published by Viking, New York, 1999

About this Item

New York: Viking, 1999. First edition, first printing, with full number line including the 1. Hardcover. As new in an as-new dust jacket. Publisher s original price intact on jacket flap. Comes with archival-quality mylar dust jacket protector. A pristine, unread copy. Octavo, 342 pages. Signed by Roddy Doyle on the title page (his name only). Review copy with promotional materials laid in. The first volume in Doyle's "Last Roundup" trilogy, followed by "Oh, Play That Thing" and "The Dead Republic." A fierce, lyrical reimagining of modern Irish history, the novel follows Henry Smart from the slums of Dublin into the heart of the Irish War of Independence. Named one of The New York Times Book Review s five best works of fiction for 1999.

Seller Inventory # 5400

Bibliographic Details

• Title: A Star Called Henry (Signed First Edition)
• Publisher: Viking, New York
• Publication Date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1568958188
• ISBN 13: 9781568958187
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: As New
• Dust Jacket Condition: As New
• Signed: Signed by Author(s)
• Seller catalogs:
  • Irish Literature

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