Inventory
A River, A City, A Family
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- £6.99
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- £6.99
Publisher Description
‘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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Poverty, suicide, and Northern Ireland's sectarian bloodshed shadow this bleak coming-of-age saga as Anderson (Imaginary Cities) recalls growing up in the 1980s and '90s in a Catholic neighborhood in Derry, site of the 1972 Bloody Sunday massacre of 14 protesters by British soldiers. It's a tense, atmospheric study of life in a war zone: gunfire echoed at night, killing innocents; IRA and Loyalist paramilitaries targeted each other and suspect civilians with bombings and shootings; Anderson and his pals dodged army patrols (while the patrols dodged snipers), endured humiliations at checkpoints and faced vicious beatings if they strayed into the wrong street. He also recounts his equally conflicted family history, including his maternal grandfather's domestic violence, his father's boyhood in a squatter camp and stint in the IRA, and his relatives' propensity for drowning, sometimes intentionally, in the River Foyle, a murky, mysterious presence threading through his vivid cityscape of Derry. Anderson's evocative prose takes disasters in stride while measuring their toll with restrained lyricism. ("ll the things they'd owned... were just smoldering ash and debris, charred imitations of what they had once been, in rooms with no roof, under a sky innocent in its ignorance," he writes of an anti-Catholic arson.) The result is a grim but engrossing frontline take on the Troubles.
