First published 2018
Thomas Kilroy grows up caught between his parents' opposing politics in the frontier town of Callan. His father, a police sergeant loyal to the Treaty, seeks escape through greyhounds and gambling. His mother holds firm to anti-Treaty convictions. Their conflicting allegiances mirror the tensions splitting their newly independent country. Young Kilroy begins his own journey at St Kieran's College in Kilkenny, where he watches Anew McMaster perform Hamlet in a traveling production. At University College Dublin, he leads the English Literature Society and discovers his voice. He teaches at Stratford College and spends time in America at Notre Dame and Vanderbilt. Returning to Dublin as a junior lecturer in 1967, he enters a BBC play competition that will launch his theatrical career. Through fragments of recollection, Kilroy pieces together how a child born during Hitler's war found his path from small-town Ireland to the stages of Dublin, joining a new generation of Irish dramatists reshaping the country's cultural landscape.
Genres: drama, literary-fiction, irish-literature, historical-fiction, 20th-century, academic
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: coming-of-age, found-family
Setting: Callan, Kilkenny, Dublin, Stratford College, Notre Dame, Vanderbilt
Period: 1967
230 pages · Paperback · The Lilliput Press