Hugo Hamilton

1945. At the end of the Second World War in Berlin, a young mother loses her two-year-old boy in the bombings. She flees to the south, where her father finds a young foundling of the same age among the refugee trains to replace the boy. He makes her promise never to tell anyone, including her husband - still fighting on the Russian front - that the boy is not her own. Nobody will know the difference. 2008. Gregor Liedmann is a Jewish man now in his sixties. He's an old rocker who ran away from home, a trumpet player, a revolutionary stone-thrower left over from the 1968 generation. On a single day spent gathering fruit in an orchard outside Berlin with family and friends, Gregor looks back over his life, sifting through fact and memory in order to establish the truth. What happened on that journey south in the final days of the war? Why did his grandfather Emil disappear, and why did the Gestapo torture his uncle Max? Here, in the calmness of the orchard, along with his ex-wife Mara and son Daniel, Gregor tries to unlock the secret of his past.--BOOK JACKET.

"Hugo longs to be released from the confused identity he has inherited from his German mother and Irish father, but the stories of his mother's shame at the hands of Allied soldiers in the aftermath of the Second World War, along with his German cousins's mysterious disappearance somewhere on the West Coast of ireland, seem determined to trap him in history. His job at the harbour, rather than offering him respite, entangles him in a bitter feud between two fishermen - one Catholic, one Protestant. Against the background of the spiralling troubles in the North, Hugo listens to the missing persons bulletins going out on the radio for his cousin and watches the unfolding harbour duel which ends in a tragic drowning. Only then is he finally able to escape the ropes of history. "--BOOK JACKET.

"As a young boy, growing up in Dublin, Hugo Hamilton struggles with the question of what it means to be speckled. The speckled people are, in his father's words, 'the new Irish, partly from Ireland, partly from somewhere else' ... Surrounded by fear, guilt, and frequently comic cultural entanglements, Hugo tries to understand the differences between Irish history and German history and to turn the strange logic of what he is told into truth. It is a journey that ends in liberation but not before the long-buried secrets at the back of the parents' wardrobe have been laid bare"--Jacket.

"Since the 1920s Finbar's Hotel has stood proudly on Dublins quays, but its glory days have long since passed it by. Now it is about to be torn down, but not until an astonishing array of guests - a barman on the make, a paranoid art thief stalking its corridors, a grieving woman who dreams of red-haired men, a desperate middle-aged man out for a wild fling - pass through for one last night. From room to room, and from tale to tale, Ireland's most famous storytellers take us through the extraordinary old building in a dazzling spin on Irish humor and drama at its best."--BOOK JACKET.

Stationed in a small, Bohemian town somewhere between Prague and Dresden in the final days of the Second World War, Officer Franz Kern and Bertha Sommer long for escape. But the road to freedom is fraught with danger. If they are caught deserting their own side they will be executed; if they stay, their lives will be worth little in the hands of the Red Army soldiers that advance on them daily. Decades later, a young American living in Germany sets out on a self-appointed mission. His task is to discover the location of the last shot fired in the war. As he delves deeper and deeper into the past, he finds himself being drawn into the story of Bertha and Franz's daring escape, and the surprising discoveries that follow.

She was dying of cancer and had only ten days to live. In a moving fictional reconstruction, the book traces two days they spent fulfilling her final wish and the intensity of those final hours in Berlin before she returned to Dublin. The narrator, Liam makes his way around Berlin with his dying companion, Una. She has prepared a list of places that she wants to see. In small leaps of memory, both Liam and Una reveal things to each other. It is a journey full of affection and honesty and humour between them, a journey leading to a heartbreaking and uplifting final discovery about her brother at the Berliner Staatsoper.