The Speckled People

Hugo Hamilton, his brothers and sister, his German mother and fiercely republican father are the speckled people. This brilliant memoir, overturning the conventional accounts of Irish childhood, depicts the confusions of the 1950s and a family's struggle to find a common history.

But first they must find a common language. Hugo's father, a sometimes brutal Irish nationalist, insists his children speak only Gaelic and denies his own father's past; his mother, Irmgard, a softly spoken Germa…