A History of Loneliness
by John Boyne
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $26.00
Publishes February 3, 2015
The Book We’re Talking About is a weekly review combining plot description and analysis with fun tidbits about the book.
–
Opening lines:
“I did not become ashamed of being Irish until I was well into the middle years of my life. I might start with the evening I showed up at my sister’s home for dinner and she had no recollection of issuing the invitation; I believe that was the night when she first showed signs of losing her mind.”
Notable passage:
“I closed my eyes for a moment and exhaled. A vision passed before my eyes: the library at Terenure College, a place where I would have given anything to be at that moment. Chaos in the stacks. Someone shelving William Goldings’s Rites of Passage trilogy in the wrong order. Claire Kilroy’s novels mixed up with Claire Keegan’s stories. It was at moments like this that I wished I were there to fix things instead of here, having to dig deep to discover some personal problem that I would probably be unable to solve.”
