BOOKS ARE CLICK AND COLLECT ONLY - pick up Friday 2-7:30pm

Julia O'Faolain, one of the most brilliant Irish writers of the past half century, has written a haunting book about her own life and the lives of her remarkable parents.

Her mother, who wrote vivid versions of old Irish folk tales, once said of the Irish Civil War: 'In those days. fear kept you from sleeping, but also from getting fat or bored.'

Her father was Director of Publicity for the IRA during that savage conflict. He made bombs. A brilliant writer, his first book of stories was banned and he was summoned by his old IRA comrades to be court-martialled for writing it. He became one of Ireland's most celebrated writers and a radical dissident during the 1940s, challenging Church and State for their betrayal of the people's needs. His affairs with Elizabeth Bowen and many other women were betrayals of a more intimate kind. This was the backdrop to Julia O'Faolain's childhood.

Her life is filled with great characters: Frank O'Connor, Paul Henry, Garret Fitzgerald, Hubert Butler, Patrick Kavanagh and Richard Ellman; and later, in their villas outside Florence, Harold Acton and Violet Trefusis, along with a cast of prim communists and raffish reactionary aristocrats.

This is a book about being an outsider looking in, a trespasser in Ireland and in other countries - France, Italy in the late 1950s, the West Coast during the turbulent sixties - and also in other lives, the permanent temptation of the creative writer.

Faber & Faber