Inventory

I cried at much of this book, and laughed my belly sore at much of it too. The writing is intoxicating. The sheer fucking poetry of it all, the splendour and the decay, the beauty and the horror; the unearthly, moon-lit sorrow... This book is brave. This book is brilliant. This book will help so many to break silences they should never have been forced to keep, about things they should never have had to live through... We need this book, and by 'we' I mean every single bleeding one of us -- Kerri ni Dochartaigh * Caught by the River * A portrait of a family and a portrait of a city -- vivid, intense, engrossing, and always beautifully written -- Kevin Barry 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 Absolutely masterful -- Lisa McGee, writer of Derry Girls 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 *