'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 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