All Of Us There
By (Author) Polly Devlin
Introduction by Emma Donoghue
Little, Brown Book Group
Virago Press Ltd
3rd January 2004
United Kingdom
General
Non Fiction
941.64082092
Paperback
192
Width 126mm, Height 198mm, Spine 5mm
650g
Polly Devlin grew up in County Tyrone, on the shores of Lough Neagh, in the fifties -- but it might as well have been another time and place altogether. In this memoir she describes in witty, spontaneous and idiosyncratic prose her life as one of seven siblings in a Catholic family in Northern Ireland. 'A brooding, evocative study of Irish childhood, of the strong bonds of love and jealousy that sisters especially feel, the guilt-ridden pressures of religion, the magical countryside, the eccentric villagers. A hauntingly lovely work ...beautifully written with poetic intensity which seems to encapsulate the Irish character with all its wit and bitterness and gift for words' HOMES AND GARDENS
'She conjures places as vividly as feelings, and feelings as exactly as her surroundings. She reinvents the past with the aid of photographic prose, an album not only for herself and her sisters in Ireland, but full of pictures many who read this book will recognise' VOGUE 'Touching and nostalgic' GUARDIAN 'I treasure All of Us There. It is the only intimate and un-angry expression of the feelings of a colonised people that I have ever read' DAVID THOMSON, author of WOODBROOK
Polly Devlin (b. 1944) is a well-known journalist (Vogue, Observer, Sun. Times) and broadcaster who has worked in both Britain and America. Currently writing a novel for Chatto, she divides her time between Dublin, London and Somerset.