Inventory: A Family Portrait of Derry's Troubled Past

Description

A lyrical memoir and family history told through four generations of fathers and sons in Northern Ireland 'Astonishing. A marvellous poetic reminder that every place is a universe of magical possibility to the perceptive mind' Damian Le Bas, author of The Stopping Places A smuggler and a deserter, Darran Anderson's grandfathers skirted the Second World War on the fringes of legality. His father survived the height of the political violence in Northern Ireland and Darran himself came of age during the final years of the Troubles before leaving his hometown to find a way to exist in the world. But when another young man in his family disappears, Darran is brought back to Derry. Walking the banks of the River Foyle, he starts on a search for what has been lost. A portrait of a city, a biography of a family, a record of the objects that make up a life, Inventory offers a vital new perspective on a troubled history.

Darran Anderson is the author of Imaginary Cities (2015), chosen as a 'Book of the Year' by the Financial Times, the Guardian, the A.V. Club and others, and described by the Guardian as 'a dizzying and brilliant piece of creative non-fiction'. He has co-edited The Honest Ulsterman, 3-AM Magazine, Dogmatika and White Noise. He writes for the likes of the Atlantic, frieze magazine, and Magnum, and has given talks at the V&A, the LSE, the Robin Boyd Foundation and the Venice Biennale.

A radically different take on memoir... Inventory is a book of hard-won truths, a detailed map of a journey out of the labyrinth, the maze of memories, anecdotes, evasions and secrets... A book of revelations, then, both large and small, its truths reverberate in the imagination long after you finish reading it -- Sean O'Hagan * Observer * Absolutely masterful -- Lisa McGee, writer of Derry Girls Inventory is a remarkable memoir; a work of auto-archaeology, really, in which Darran Anderson disinters his own and his country's hard pasts, shaking life, love and loss out of the objects of his youth in Northern Ireland. Bleak, tender, inventive and oddly gripping, this is a book of restless ghosts, written in defiance of darkness, and told by means of diving into what Nabokov once called "the dream life of debris" -- Robert Macfarlane Important... vividly rendered... Inventory may in fact be above all an exercise in memory -- gathering, questioning, verifying, and identifying the voids. Even when the subjects are difficult to catch, the hunt is always vital and compelling -- Garrett Carr * Times Literary Supplement * A portrait of a family and a portrait of a city -- vivid, intense, engrossing, and always beautifully written -- Kevin Barry