Following a crippling depression and institutionalization, the writer "Desmond" wanders from his native Dublin around an increasingly unrecognizable Europe, and as far as the southern United States, assembling a patchwork of small stories, conversations, love affairs, memories, regrets, and confrontations: "the labyrinth of stories of people whose lives you touch . . . so that your mind becomes like a polychromatic Irish pub." Whether a series of tragic postcards, a cubist novel, or a memoir shorn of its connective tissue, A Farewell to Prague stands as Desmond Hogan's greatest achievement: a catalog of the moments that justify a life—or shine a light on its emptiness.

'To seek the beginning is to go back a long time ago, when the town in which I am writing was a little different and trees hung at the end of the town, trees hung obsessively, many trees, much green at the end of the street come summer, come the arrival of leaves and sun and buttercup blaze.' It is the late 1940s, and Sean and Liam, middle-class boys in a small West of Ireland town, share a powerful bond of love and rivalry: each long for the same women. At university together in Dublin, Sean and Liam's burgeoning sexuality leads them to a deeper, almost mystical level of involvement. They befriend Christine, rich, vulnerable and desperate for affection, and Sarah, glamorous, spoiled, intoxicating; her body is a seductive bridge between the pair, which they ultimately cross with painful and profound consequences. The Leaves on Grey is the story of Ireland, 'maker of wounds, tormentor of youth, ultimately breaker of all that was sensitive and enriched by sun, rain, wind'. Sean...

With forty pounds he went back to England. Curlews cried in the bog next to Ballinasloe station. A taxi-man looked harassed - no work maybe. They kissed - slenderly. The train left. She walked away.' And so Diarmaid withdraws from his mother once more, as he returns to London just before his eighteenth birthday. In the quiet of her Galway home, Susan is forced to confront a ruptured relationship with her only son, and the ikons - feathers, beads, paper accumulated into shapes - marking the progress of his troubled childhood. As she pursues him across England, meeting friends and lovers left in his wake, she resigns herself to the man her son has become, and must face a new identity of her own. In this story about the dark complexities of love, the mysteries of sexuality, the anguishes of motherhood, Desmond Hogan conveys an unassailable truth about human experience: that nothing and no one can stay the same forever. Desmond Hogan won the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize in 1991,...

Desmond Hogan is one of Ireland's leading writers. In addition to his novels and stories, he has travelled widely (for various newspapers) to some of the strangest and most fascinating parts of the world. In the past fifteen years, he has visited Soviet Russia, Central America, Europe, Africa and the Middle East. Each of the pieces in this volume is both a personal and a geographical journey, and taken together they amount to a vivid picture of a changing world. 'Hogan is a portraitist of place, sometimes a minaturist, but the detail is exquisite... he writes superbly. This 'scrapbook' has a coherence, an identity, that comes only from a refusal to take things lightly while permitting lightness to the imagination.' — Ian Bell, The Herald. 'Hogan has a perfect eye for happenings at the edge and for the details that others ignore. He writes in the lyrical prose of a wandering, restless storyteller... his haunted, mesmeric style is laden with echoes and an elegaic richness.'...

Des Hogan is, and has always been, the real thing - a writer of great originality, dramatic flair, linguistic invention - who remakes the world every time he puts pen to paper.' Neil Jordan. Desmond Hogan is one of most remarkable literary talents to have come out of Ireland in the past half-century. Larks' Eggs affirms that stature. Here, with twenty-two classic stories taken from earlier collections and twelve fresh narratives, Hogan displays anew his lyricism, compassion and sheer prismatic brilliance. His subject is exile and self-image, explored through isolates and eccentrics, brittle lives trapped by poverty, personal histories and restless identities, giving a voice to those on the margins -Travellers, the misplaced, the dispossessed. Describing 'The Airedale' in William Trevor's The Oxford Book of Short Stories, Cressida Connolly wrote: 'it is profound, moving and exquisitely executed. Hogan is one of the finest writers alive today and deserves to be much better...