This text is the story of rootlessness, of a London-Irish boy who has two identities and feels at home with neither. John Walsh found the Irishness of his parents' Battersea home stiflingly warm and puzzlingly foreign. Spellbound equally by Mick Jagger and by images of Irish martyrdom, he discovered at the age of 16 an extended family he had never known existed. In the hidden life of Galway was revelation that begged a crucial question: how do we know where our true nature lies? By his mother's bedside in a Galway hospital, 30 years later, he starts to unpick the past, looking for clues to his identity.
This text is the story of rootlessness, of a London-Irish boy who has two identities and feels at home with neither. John Walsh found the Irishness of his parents' Battersea home stiflingly warm and puzzlingly foreign. Spellbound equally by Mick Jagger and by images of Irish martyrdom, he discovered at the age of 16 an extended family he had never known existed. In the hidden life of Galway was revelation that begged a crucial question: how do we know where our true nature lies? By his mother's bedside in a Galway hospital, 30 years later, he starts to unpick the past, looking for clues to his identity.
John Walsh was born in 1953 in London. Currently Assistant Editor of the Independent, he has written for and edited numerous newspapers and magazines. He has been a radio presenter and was director of the Cheltenham Festival of Literature in 1997.
'A book to be relished' WILLIAM TREVOR 'The reader should be warned that this is a book that makes you laugh out loud in public. A magnificent entertainment' Bernard O'Donoghue, Independent 'The Falling Angels is a work of autobiography dominated by a single theme -- the author's love-hate relationship with his Irish-Catholic heritage. John Walsh's father was a doctor from Galway and his mother was a nurse from Sligo. They came to England to find employment, met on a pilgrimage to Rome, married, and settled in the scruffy Battersea end of Clapham, where Walsh and his sister Madelyn were brought up... Anyone with even the slightest interest in or connection with Ireland will have a grand time with this book' DAVID LODGE, SUNDAY TIMES 'A beautifully written book, a family memoir which is moving, honest and funny by turns... the description of the terrible evening in which Walsh insists that his father, mother and a visiting priest and nun watch a film about Ireland -- only to find that it contains an explicit and embarrassing sex scene -- made me cry with laughter... Anyone who has visited Ireland, or grew up there will feel serial tremors of recognition at the details he describes' JENNY MCCARTNEY, SUNDAY TELEGRAPH 'A warm, seamlessly well-written memoir... the prose is fluent, its craftsmanship meticulous. The dialogue is dead-on: the hungry father could "eat a reverend mother's arse through a cane chair..." Walsh's affection for his subject matter is infectious' LIONEL SHRIVER, GUARDIAN 'In an age of unreliable fake-Irish memoirs, John Walsh's The Falling Angels convincingly and hilariously anatomises the uncertain identities of the emigre Irish middle class...' ROY FOSTER, NEW STATESMAN BOOKS OF THE YEAR
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