Hugo Hamilton: Conversation with the Sea [2025] paperback

Hugo Hamilton is a master at evoking placelessness, and in this hypnotic, passionate and
urgent novel, he cuts a clean line to the truth of our mindless moment - truly a book for
our time. - Paul Lynch
Description
Fleeing his failed marriage in Berlin, Lukas Dorn revisits the West of Ireland, the place of
his honeymoon two decades earlier. While his former wife is being cancelled at work and
his daughter is arrested at a street protest, he tries to make sense of his broken life with
his journal as his sole companion.
His inherited memory of the Nazi Holocaust comes face to face with the present when he
meets a refugee from a recent warzone. As Lukas communes with the elements in this
wild coastal place, he is forced into a confrontation with the past that will carry him to the
edge of existence.
Conversation with the Sea speaks with heart-rending tenderness to the present moment,
as it explores truth, illusion and the deadly silencing of war in a captivating tale of love in
a time of displacement.
In the vein of such authors as C laire Keegan, C olm Tóibín, Paul Lynch, Anne Enright.
It is a novel that speaks poignantly to the present moment in time, on themes of war,
conflict and inter-generational trauma.

Reviews
''Hugo Hamilton is a master at evoking placelessness, and in this hypnotic, passionate
and urgent novel, he cuts a clean line to the truth of our mindless moment - truly a
book for our time.'' - Paul Lynch
''I don''t think I''ve ever read a book as wise, or as moving. It''s replete with images that
I know will stay with me forever: the red dots; the motorcycling couple; the pinkjacketed
U-bahn man; the flung suitcases; the women on the truck; and Lukas''s almost
ghostly, liminal presence in his own story, as he tries and tries to give coherence to the
inchoate; to work his grief and trauma into some kind of resolution. His pain and his
yearning lift up from every line, and what lines they are. This is a book of Everything:
love, family, home, war, migration, loss; at once and by turns gentle and ferocious,
luminous and dark, and ultimately filled with hope. I feel changed by this novel, and I
will treasure it forever.'' - Donal Ryan
''
This novel was just waiting for Hugo Hamilton to come along and write it. Set in the
west of Ireland, it is both local and displaced, folkloric and modern. Told with
Hamilton''s signature purity of tone, this is an epic story about how love and history
intersect.'' - Anne Enright
''Hugo Hamilton has written a magnificent book. Conversation with the Sea is as
compulsive as it is lyrical, deeply moving, utterly readable, bursting with life. The plot
is devious and seductive; the prose takes your breath away - it towers over
contemporary fiction. A triumph.'' - Frank McGuinness
Author Biography
Hugo Hamilton is the best-selling author of The Speckled People, a memoir of his German-
Irish childhood in Dublin, growing up with his German mother and prohibited by his
revolutionary Irish father from speaking English. It was translated into twenty languages
and adapted for stage at the Gate Theatre. He has published ten novels including Dublin
Palms and The Pages, a collection of short stories, and a second memoir The Sailor in the
Wardrobe. His stories have appeared in the New Yorker. He has won numerous literary
awards for his work including the Prix Femina in France and the Bundesverdienstkreuz
order of merit, awarded by the German state for his exploration of cultural diversity.
Hamilton is a member of Aosdána and lives in Dublin.