ROSENHEIM AND WINDERMERE evokes with a Proustian sense of time passed, the contrasting worlds of two houses as experienced by a small boy in the latter years of World War II in Cork City. The grandmother’s house is a world of death and intrigue, the grandmother dying while the maids gossip in the kitchen. In his parents’ house the war is a constant presence in which his parents are involved. Between the two houses two wars of different natures are taking place, one on the domestic plane, the other on the world stage. Written with a precision of language and a lyrical sense of things seen but not understood by a small boy, a whole world is encompassed in this remarkable exercise in recalling a lost childhood and a vanished world.

THE AUTHOR:

BRIAN LALOR has pursued a distinguished career in which the disciplines of art, archaeology and writing merge. Born in Cork, he studied at the Crawford Municipal School of Art and subsequently in London. In a brief archaeological career he made significant discoveries on the architecture of classical Jerusalem. Amongst his many books are a definitive illustrated edition of Oscar Wilde’s The Ballad of Reading Gaol, (1997) and a study of Irish early medieval architecture, The Irish Round Tower (1999). He was the General Editor of the internationally award- winning Encyclopaedia of Ireland (2003) and the recipient of the International Swift Society Award  for Juvenalian Satire (2004). His most recent publication is Ink-Stained Hands (2011), a pioneering study of fine-art printmaking in twentieth century Ireland. He lives in West Cork.

PRAISE FOR THE AUTHOR:

The Encyclopaedia of Ireland, Gill and McMillan/Yale University Press, 2003
‘A marvellous, multitudinous, and instructive compendium, up-to-date and up-to-speed.’  SEAMUS HEANEY
‘It’s all here. Everything you ever wanted  to know about Ireland and its people.’ MIA FARROW

 The Laugh of Lost Men, Mainstream Publishing, 1997
‘Lalor writes like a less folksy Ben Kiely and a crushingly critical Paul Theroux.’ TOM WIDGER, SUNDAY TRIBUNE

 Ultimate Dublin Guide, O’Brien Press, 1991
‘A Dublin book for a Desert Island.’ EVENING PRESS

 West of West, an Artist’s Encounter with West Cork, Brandon, 1990
‘In its carefully sculpted sentences Brian Lalor celebrates West Cork, not onlywith that special insight of the artist , but with much obvious love.’ TIM CRAMER, THE CORK EXAMINER

 
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ISBN: 978 0 9562231 66
156 x 234 mm
224pp/illustrated
Paperback
Biography
October 2011