View a pageWilliam Carleton
The Autobiography
foreword by Benedict Kiely
£7.95, £19.95 (hb)
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.
Book Details
ISBN 1 870132 75 0
Paperback 238 pages
Book Reviews
"A striking new edition of the unfinished autobiography of the novelist described as 'the Irish Dickens'. Few areas of Irish life were safe from Carleton's satirical pen. He succeeded in offending 'every class of Irishman', which is quite an accolade" Antrim Guardian