In the autumn of 1868, laden with accolades, but melancholic, written-out, and riddled with the cancer that would shortly kill him, the novelist William Carleton turned to a subject as rich and difficult as any he had yet undertaken: himself.

The result was this fine - and alas unfinished - autobiography, a fresh, vivid, vigorous work which covers the first twenty-eight years or so of his life. It takes him from a near idyllic childhood in the Clogher valley to a bed of rags and straw shakedowns in Dirty Lane, Dublin, from which, equipped only with his genius and a powerful sense of destiny, the young Carleton went out upon the world.