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    Wicked Little Joe
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    Wicked Little Joe
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    Wicked Little Joe
    Ebook358 pages6 hours

    Wicked Little Joe

    By Joseph Hone

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    'In the summer of 1939, as a two-year-old in London, I was given away by my parents to a Chelsea friend and taken on the Irish Mail to Dublin.' Thus begins this extraordinary memoir by travel writer and novelist Joseph Hone, one of eight children farmed out by impecunious and inebriate parents, who was raised at Maidenhall in County Kilkenny by the historian and essayist Hubert Butler and his wife Peggy, sister of Tyrone Guthrie of Annaghmakerrig in County Monaghan. The story is told through a cache of letters discovered on Hubert Butler's death between he and his friend 'Old Joe', Little Joe's grandfather and biographer of Yeats and George Moore, upon whom fell the financial responsibility for his grandson's upbringing. This account of Joseph Hone's childhood and youth during the 1940s and 50s in rural Ireland, among the privileged and artistic elite of his generation living down-at-heel if comfortable lives in a newly emergent state, is an enthralling reminder of the happenstance and precariousness of all our lives. Like William Trevor, Joe was boarded out at Sandford Park in Dublin and then at St Columba's, both of which he documents in loving and comic detail, gaining as much stimulation from his home environment as from the excesses and disappointments of these single-sex establishments. He writes with feeling and insight of the lives of those in his circle and beyond - his teachers and foster parents and friends - working as an assistant for John Ford during the making of The Quiet Man, and finding himself as the writer he was to become. This numinous work of autobiography and self-interrogation bears comparison with Nabokov's Speak Memory or Frank O'Connor's An Only Child. It will take its place as a classic of the genre while illuminating unknown corners of Ireland's cultural landscape. "A brilliant, often hilariously funny, and above all, beautifully written story." Irish Arts Review. "An invaluable account of an unusual upbringing and a wonderful portrait of two Irish men of letters..." 5 stars - The Dubliner
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherThe Lilliput Press
    Release dateSep 1, 2011
    ISBN9781843512431
    Unavailable
    Wicked Little Joe
    Author

    Joseph Hone

    Joseph Hone (b. 1937) is a British author of spy novels. Born in London, he was sent to Dublin in 1939, and spent most of the next two decades living in Ireland. His first novel, The Private Sector (1971), introduced the globetrotting spy Peter Marlow—the character for whom Hone would become best known. Set during the Six Day War, The Private Sector was well received by critics, who have compared it to the work of Eric Ambler, Len Deighton, and John le Carré. Hone published three more titles in the series—The Sixth Directorate (1975), The Flowers of the Forest (1980), and The Valley of the Fox (1982)—before moving on to other work. In addition to his espionage fiction, Hone has found success in travel writing. His most recent books include Wicked Little Joe (2009), a memoir, and Goodbye Again (2011). 

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