Memoir Author:John McGahern -As wise and compelling a book as any of his elegiac and graceful novels.- David MitchellThis is the story of John McGahern-s childhood; of his mother-s death, his father-s anger and bafflement, and his own discovery of literature.-Long before Frank McCourt made an entire industry out of twinkly eyed accounts of the poverty and institutionalised... more » brutality of mid-twentieth-century rural Ireland, John McGahern, Ireland-s greatest living novelist, had already shone wise and unsparing light on this same world - Memoir is the full, unadorned story of his childhood and adolescence in Leitrim - His finest book yet.- Stephanie Merritt, Observer-In a tremendously distinguished career, he has never written more movingly, or with a sharper eye.- Andrew Motion, Guardian-I have admired, even loved, John McGahern-s work since his first novel - Memoir strips the skin off his fiction as he faces a desperate early life with great force and tenderness.- Melvyn Bragg« less