Harbor Boys: A Memoir

As a boy, Hugo Hamilton felt a strong desire to be rid of the confused identity he had inherited from his German mother and Irish father. Yet history's determined grip tightened its hold. A job at the harbor, rather than offering him respite, entangled him in a bitter feud between two fishermen—one Catholic, one Protestant. Against the background of the spiraling Troubles in the North, Hugo listened to the missing persons bulletins going out on the radio for his German cousin who mysteriously vanished somewhere on the west coast of Ireland and watched as the unfolding harbor duel moved toward a tragic end. '

From the author of The Speckled People, one of the most lyrical and affecting memoirs of recent times, comes a powerful, deeply moving, and well-observed account of a young man's determined struggles to place himself in a world of his own making.

As a boy, Hugo Hamilton felt a strong desire to be rid of the confused identity he had inherited from his German mother and Irish father. Yet history's determined grip tightened its hold. A job at the harbor, rather than offering him respite, entangled him in a bitter feud between two fishermen—one Catholic, one Protestant. Against the background of the spiraling Troubles in the North, Hugo listened to the missing persons bulletins going out on the radio for his German cousin who mysteriously vanished somewhere on the west coast of Ireland and watched as the unfolding harbor duel moved toward a tragic end. '

From the author of The Speckled People, one of the most lyrical and affecting memoirs of recent times, comes a powerful, deeply moving, and well-observed account of a young man's determined struggles to place himself in a world of his own making.

Publishers Weekly

There's no waking from the nightmare of history in this haunting and sometimes heavy-handed follow-up to Hamilton's prize-winning memoir, The Speckled People. The author's coming-of-age in 1960s Dublin is dominated by his mother and father, she an anti-Nazi German immigrant, he an ardent Irish nationalist who bans the English language from their home. In this household, every conversation comes shackled to politics and tragedy Hamilton's parents even compare Beatlemania to Nazism. No wonder the lad develops a Dostoyevskian guilt complex, forever imagining himself complicit in crimes he didn't commit, and longs "to have no past... no conscience and no memory." He escapes to a harbor-front job, but even there the Troubles loom when his Catholic boss feuds with a Protestant fisherman. The story often sags under the author's determination to set everyday happenings in dire historical context: when Hamilton fishes out a pal who fell into the harbor while retrieving a lobster pot, he immediately wishes, "I could bring others back as well... even those who died in Northern Ireland, even those who died in the Irish famine, or those who had been murdered in the Ukraine." But at his best, Hamilton writes with a wonderfully evocative feeling for character and landscape that brings to life the Ireland he grew up in. (Dec.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

In his first novel since the bestselling memoir The Speckled People, Hugo Hamilton has created a truly compelling story of lost identity and a remarkable reflection on the ambiguity of belonging.