Presents a memoir of the author's life near Dublin, a city that inspired his imagination and literary life and served as a backdrop for the dissatisfactions of adult years shaped by Dublin's cultural, political, architectural, and social history.

"Born and bred in a small town a train ride away from Dublin, author John Banville ... saw the city as a place of enchantment when he was a child. It was first a birthday treat, the world his beloved, eccentric aunt inhabited. When he came of age and took up residence there, the city was a frequent backdrop for his dissatisfactions as a young writer (James Joyce had 'seized upon the city for his own literary purposes and in doing so had used it up'). When he lived outside Ireland, the city remained alive and indelible in his memory (that 'bright abyss' in which 'time's alchemy works'). Returning to live in Ireland, he found Dublin to be as fascinating--albeit for different reasons--as it had been to his seven-year-old self. Now, in an evocative, witty, clear-eyed 'quasi-memoir,' he guides us around the city, delighting in its high and low cultural, architectural, political and social histories, and interweaving the memories that are attached to particular places and moments and people. The result a book as much about the life of a city as it is about a life intermittently lived there--a wonderfully idiosyncratic tour of Dublin, and a tender yet powerful ode to a formative time and place for the artist as a young man."--Dust jacket.