If the past is another country – what happens when we revisit it, one day a year?

Carlo Gébler has done just that. Here is the story of Ireland – from the tail end of the Troubles to the Good Friday agreement, to the glory days of the Celtic Tiger to the recession to Brexit and on to the present, where, it appears, everything we thought we could take for granted is no longer a given.

Drawing from journals he has kept for over four decades, Gébler stitches together days of his life into something bigger than his own lived experiences – a vivid patchwork history of the island over thirty-five years, capturing those sweeping changes in sharp, funny, slantwise pieces that will prompt readers to reflect on the strange process of how we got here.

This intelligent and affectionate compilation, written in Gébler's sparkling prose, is a joy. Whether read from beginning to end or dipped into, it will appeal to anyone with even a passing interest in the astonishing evolution of our island.



CARLO GÉBLER is a novelist, biographer, playwright, memoirist, critic and occasional broadcaster. He has worked as a prison and university teacher for many years and also worked with Patrick Maguire, who was wrongly convicted of the IRA Guildford pub bombings, on his memoir My Father's Watch. He is a member of Aosdána and lives in Enniskillen, Northern Ireland.



A vivid and arresting diary as memoir.



A Cold Eye , provides a perfect balance between the political and the personal. 

And by the time I put the volume down, I'd gained a deeper understanding of Northern Ireland's troubled history, and how it felt to live there, yet I never felt lectured or talked down to.

There's lightness in the sections on his family — on a Christmas without electricity, and a bike ride with one of his sons; and he recounts meetings with writer Fay Weldon and Tony Blair's father-in-law, Tony Booth. 

And these juxtapose beautifully with the most hard-hitting accounts.