Dog Days - Tapa blanda

'Tired of walking in the dream I have returned to the country where I was born half a century ago' - The Higgins family is now dispersed; the third son of four brothers is himself the father of three sons in a family also dispersed, and our author 'looking for the quietness that Julian Sorel found in prison. ' he finds this problematical peace, sharing a bungalow near Brittas in Co Wicklow in an awkward two year tenancy with a school mistress with back back trouble. DOG DAYS is an account of those two years, with flashbacks to previous diaries that reveal a murky Dublin of whores and Provo killing, a raindrenched Connemara.

'The ferocious and dazzling prose of Aidan Higgins, the pure architecture of his sentences, takes the breath out of you. He is one of our great writers. Dog Days is a magpie's hoard of misadventures, little grass fires of the heart and left-hand sleight. The reader who cannot take pleasure from it must be dead' E. Annie Proulx

'Dog Days is a meaty composition of memories from a life well-lived. The setting changes from Connemara to London to Austin, Texas, to Berlin, to Santa Cruz, California...It shifts around the entirety of Higgins's time, touching on life's majors - his father's slow end - going back to the glory of childhood trickery...Thoughts, opinions, observations seep like melted chocolate through the erudite confection of Higgins's memories. From golf to the Titanic, architecture to nuclear devices, each is touched on...The overall feel is of a life lived every inch...As he leaves to go on we feel glad for his continued, and chronicled existence' Scotland on Sunday

'His tone is richly comic...complex and fascinating' The Times

'A passionate and troubling complement to Higgins's prolific output and an exemplary addition to the canon of Irish writing' Times Literary Supplement