Before the Wax Hardened

By Adrian Kenny

Originally published in 1992, this childhood memoir, revised and augmented, now has the status of a modern Irish classic.

‘He brings maturity to bear on the past, without making a parable of it. Most of all he makes the past seem as it really is, swimming about inside us. This is a great book altogether.’ ­­ –– The Irish Times

On his first trip abroad, Adrian Kenny observes that the signs are in one language only. There is no need for translation: there is nothing behind. Not so in his suburban childhood and adolescence, where Mayo is behind Dublin, poor fields behind the bourgeois drawing rooms of Rathmines, wildness behind authority. Attached to both, his attempts to reconcile them take him from close certainty to total collapse in the year of change – America, 1968.

‘What was it all for?’ his father asks.

‘It's like the end of the Aeneid,’ whispers his friend.

‘You came at the end of that world,’ Father Wilmot says. The end of Latin Mass, maids, floggings and charcoal suits.

The author's keen eye and clear style lends this portrayal of an individual and a generation the truth and elegance of an enduring work of art.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Lilliput Press
• Release date: May 1, 2017
• ISBN: 9781843517221

Adrian Kenny

Adrian Kenny was born in 1945 and educated at Gonzaga College and UCD. His recent work includes Istanbul Diary (1994),The Family Business (1999), a sequel to Before the Wax Hardened, and Portobello Notebook (2012). He is a member of Aosdána.