Overview

Shortlisted for the 2026 Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year Award 'I feel changed by this novel' Donal Ryan 'An epic story' Anne Enright 'Truly a book for our time' Paul Lynch 'Near-perfect beauty' Irish Times FROM THE AWARD-WINNING AUTHOR OF THE SPECKLED PEOPLE 'Deeply moving, utterly readable, bursting with life' Frank McGuinness 'Hamilton leaves you with images that linger' Sunday Independent Fleeing his failed marriage in Berlin, Lukas Dorn revisits the West of Ireland, the place of his honeymoon two decades earlier. While his former wife is being cancelled at work and his daughter is arrested at a street protest, he tries to make sense of his broken life with a journal as his sole companion. His inherited memory of the Nazi Holocaust comes face to face with the present when he meets a refugee from a recent warzone. As Lukas communes with the elements in this wild coastal place, he is forced into a confrontation with the past that will carry him to the edge of existence. Conversation with the Sea speaks with heart-rending tenderness to the present moment, as it explores truth, illusion and the deadly silencing of war in a captivating tale of love in a time of displacement. 'Unsettling and strangely absorbing' Irish Independent 'A profound meditation ... precise, masterly' Irish Examiner

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9781399752121

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Reviews

I don't think I've ever read a book as wise, or as moving. It's replete with images that I know will stay with me forever: the red dots; the motorcycling couple; the pink-jacketed U-bahn man; the flung suitcases; the women on the truck; and Lukas's almost ghostly, liminal presence in his own story, as he tries and tries to give coherence to the inchoate; to work his grief and trauma into some kind of resolution. His pain and his yearning lift up from every line, and what lines they are. This is a book of Everything: love, family, home, war, migration, loss; at once and by turns gentle and ferocious, luminous and dark, and ultimately filled with hope. I feel changed by this novel, and I will treasure it forever. * Donal Ryan * Hugo Hamilton has written a magnificent book. Conversation with the Sea is as compulsive as it is lyrical, deeply moving, utterly readable, bursting with life. The plot is devious and seductive; the prose takes your breath away - it towers over contemporary fiction. A triumph. * Frank McGuinness * Hamilton's prose is stripped back but never thin ... he leaves you with images that linger like grit in the eye * Sunday Independent * No summary can capture the near-perfect beauty of Conversation with the Sea ... It's prose is fresh and clear, yet shadowed by menace ... It's this emotional and moral depth that makes reading Hugo Hamilton so refreshing * Irish Times * One of the book's most striking qualities is its prose ... addictive to read ... Conversation with the Sea is both unsettling and strangely absorbing * Irish Independent * A profound meditation ... Conversation with the Sea is a precise, masterly novel that encompasses themes of trauma, displacement, war, history, love, hope, and hopelessness * Irish Examiner *

Author Information

Hugo Hamilton is the best-selling author of The Speckled People, a memoir of his German-Irish childhood in Dublin, growing up with his German mother and prohibited by his revolutionary Irish father from speaking English. It was translated into twenty languages and adapted for stage at the Gate Theatre. He has published ten novels including Dublin Palms and The Pages, a collection of short stories, and a second memoir The Sailor in the Wardrobe. His stories have appeared in the New Yorker. He has won numerous literary awards for his work including the Prix Femina in France and the Bundesverdienstkreuz order of merit, awarded by the German state for his exploration of cultural diversity. Hamilton is a member of Aosdana and lives in Dublin.

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