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Hide Away

Hide Away

by Dermot Bolger

Imprint: New Island Books

6.15 x 9.2 in

Paperback
9781848409385
December 2024
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$18.99

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Hidden behind the walls of Grangegorman Mental Hospital in 1941, four lives collide, all afflicted by the human cost of wars, betrayals and trauma.

Gus, a shrewd attendant, is the keeper of everyone’s secrets, especially his own. Two War of Independence veterans are reunited. One, Jimmy Nolan, has spent twenty years as a psychiatric patient, unable to recover from his involvement in youthful killings. In contrast, Francis Dillon has prospered as a businessman, until rumours of Civil War atrocities cause his collapse, suffering delusions of enemies seeking to kill him.

Doctor Fairfax has fled London after his gay lover’s death. Desperate to rekindle a sense of purpose, Fairfax tries to help Dillon recover by getting him to talk about his past. But a code of silence surrounds the traumatic violence Ireland has endured. Is Dillon willing to break his silence to find a way back to his family?

In this superb evocation of hidden worlds, master storyteller Dermot Bolger explores the aftershock within people who participate in violence and the fault-lines in all post-conflict societies only held together by collective amnesia.

Born in Finglas, North Dublin, in 1959, DERMOT BOLGER is one of Ireland’s best-known writers across a range of genres. His fourteen novels include The Journey Home, A Second Life, and The Lonely Sea and Sky. His most recent play, Last Orders At The Dockside, had a hugely successful sold-out run at the Abbey Theatre in 2019. His last new collection of poetry was The Venice Suite (2012), a book which resonated widely for its exploration of loss.

With superb characters and a haunting ending, this tale of post Civil War Ireland is a penetrating read. ~Rory Kiberd, Sunday Business Post

‘It’s a bleak subject, treated here with the sharpest awareness of historical troubles and taboos. Hide Away, against the odds, makes an invigorating read, for all its encapsulation of a broken world.’ ~Patricia Craig

‘Hide Away is as good as anything the multi-faceted writer has given us thus far… Bolger’s masterful novel pokes at the many sores that festoon a country “barely held together by the invisible sticking plaster of everyone keeping their secrets”: the treatment of homosexuals, the use of the health system as a dumping ground for relatives who were in the way and the burying of historical scars behind hospital walls.’ ~Pat Carty

'Narrated from multiple characters’ points of view, Hide Away is an astute character study concerned with guilt, betrayal (personal and public), and the secret lives of those we love.’ ~Brendan Daly