Before The Wax Hardened

Adrian Kenny author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:The Lilliput Press Ltd

Published:1st May '17

Should be back in stock very soon

Before The Wax Hardened cover

Originally published in 1992, this childhood memoir, revised and augmented, now has the status of a modern Irish classic. On his first trip abroad, Adrian Kenny observes that the signs are in one language only. There is no need for translation: there is nothing behind. Not so in his suburban childhood and adolescence, where Mayo is behind Dublin, poor fields behind the bourgeois drawing rooms of Rathmines, wildness behind authority. Attached to both, his attempts to reconcile them take him from close certainty to total collapse in the year of change – America, 1968. ‘What was it all for?’ his father asks. ‘It's like the end of the Aeneid,’ whispers his friend. ‘You came at the end of that world,’ Father Wilmot says. The end of Latin Mass, maids, floggings and charcoal suits. The author's keen eye and clear style lends this portrayal of an individual and a generation the truth and elegance of an enduring work of art.

‘He brings maturity to bear on the past, without making a parable of it. Most of all he makes the past seem as it really is, swimming about inside us. This is a great book altogether.’ –– The Irish Times
He brings maturity to bear on the past, without making a parable of it. Most of all he makes the past seem as it really is, swimming about inside us. This is a great book altogether. -- Rosita Sweetman * Irish Times *

ISBN: 9781843517108

Dimensions: 215mm x 136mm x 250mm

Weight: 300g

244 pages