Other People's Countries

Winner of the 2014 Duff Cooper Prize Winner of the 2015 Welsh Book of the Year Award Shortlisted for the 2015 James Tait Black Memorial Prize Shortlisted for the 2015 PEN Ackerley prize Longlisted for the 2014 Thwaites Wainwright Prize Disarming, eloquent and illuminating, this meditation on place, time and memory, could only have been written by a poet, or a novelist, or a professor. Happily, Patrick McGuinness is all three, and Other People's Countries is a marvel: a stunning piece of lyrical writing, rich in narrative and character âe" full of fresh ways of looking at how we grow up, how we start to make sense of the world. This book evolved out of stories the author told his children: stories about the Belgian border town of Bouillon, where his mother came from, and where he has been going three times a year since he was a child âe" first with his parents and now with his son and daughter. This town of eccentrics, of charm, menace and wonder, is re-created beautifully âe" 'Most of my childhood,' he say