Other People's Countries

A Journey into Memory

Patrick McGuinness author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Vintage Publishing

Published:19th Mar '15

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

Other People's Countries cover

A very special book of short, Proustian pieces on childhood and how the places of our childhood are embedded in us. Winner of the 2014 Duff Cooper Prize Winner of the 2015 Welsh Book of the Year Award Shortlisted for the 2015 James Tait Black Memorial Prize Shortlisted for the 2015 PEN Ackerley prize Longlisted for the 2014 Thwaites Wainwright Prize

Takes you down the thin cobblestoned streets of the Belgian border town of Bouillon. This book offers exquisite meditation on place, time and memory is an illicit peek into other people's countries, into the spaces they have populated with their memories, and might just make you revisit your own in a new and surprising way.

Winner of the 2014 Duff Cooper Prize
Winner of the 2015 Welsh Book of the Year Award

Shortlisted for the 2015 James Tait Black Memorial Prize
Shortlisted for the 2015 PEN Ackerley prize
Longlisted for the 2014 Thwaites Wainwright Prize


Let me take you down the thin cobblestoned streets of the Belgian border town of Bouillon. Let me take you down the alleys that lead into its past. To a town peopled with eccentrics, full of charm, menace and wonder. To the days before television, to Marie Bodard’s sweetshop, to the Nazi occupation and unexpected collaborators. To a place where one neighbour murders another over the misfortune of pigs and potatoes. To the hotel where the French poet Verlaine his lover Rimbaud, holed up whilst on the run from family, creditors and the law.


This exquisite meditation on place, time and memory is an illicit peek into other people’s countries, into the spaces they have populated with their memories, and might just make you revisit your own in a new and surprising way.

McGuinness is a marvellous writer... On every page there are breathtakingly gorgeous images, similes, metaphors. -- John Banville * Observer *
McGuinness has written the great book on Belgium and modern memory, or even Belgium and modern being. He takes his place among those singers and painters of the haunted, the melancholy, the diminished, the caricatural, the humdrum. -- Michael Hofmann * Guardian *
Lyrical and evocative... This is a very Proustian memoir, whose effect will be to drive the reader into contemplation of their own half-forgotten childhood home. -- Josh Glancy * Sunday Times *
A rich analysis of home and homelessness. -- James Wood * London Review of Books *
This book had a powerful effect on me... Sometimes hilarious, sometimes freighted with tragedy. -- Gillian Tindall * Literary Review *

  • Winner of Pol Roger Duff Cooper Prize 2015 (UK)
  • Winner of Wales Book of the Year 2015 (UK)
  • Short-listed for PEN/ Ackerley Prize 2015 (UK)

ISBN: 9780099587033

Dimensions: 198mm x 129mm x 13mm

Weight: 149g

208 pages