The Leaves on Grey

by Hogan, Desmond

• ISBN13: 9781843516200
• ISBN10: 1843516209
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2015-01-22
• Publisher: The Lilliput Press

Summary

It is the late 1940s, and Sean and Liam, middle-class boys in a small West of Ireland town, share a powerful bond of love and rivalry: each long for the same women. At university together in Dublin, Sean and Liam’s burgeoning sexuality leads them to a deeper, almost mystical level of involvement. They befriend Christine, rich, vulnerable and desperate for affection, and Sarah, glamorous, spoiled, intoxicating; her body is a seductive bridge between the pair, which they ultimately cross with painful and profound consequences. The Leaves on Grey is the story of Ireland, ‘maker of wounds, tormentor of youth, ultimately breaker of all that was sensitive and enriched by sun, rain, wind’. Sean and Liam, and the men and women who become part of their lives, are both the creators and victims of their birthright. This sensitive, passionate story is Desmond Hogan’s second novel, originally published in 1980. It is reissued here with a new afterword by the author

Author Biography

Desmond Hogan is the author of The Ikon Maker, A Curious Street, A New Shirt, and A Farewell to Prague. His short-story collection The Diamonds at the Bottom of the Sea won the 1980 John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize; others include Larks' Eggs: New and Selected Stories, Old Swords and Other Stories, and House of Mourning and Other Stories. In 1971 he won the Hennessy Literary Award, in 1977 the Rooney Prize for Literature, and in 1991 was awarded the DAAD Fellowship in Berlin. Editions Grasset & Fasquelle in Paris have acquired all his works for translation into French, embarking in 2015 and concluding in 2022.