Books by Aidan Higgins

Opening with a quote from Richard Brautigan--"I've been examining half-scraps of my childhood. They are pieces of distant life that have no form or meaning."--Scenes from a Receding Past constructs the adolescence and early adulthood of Dan Ruttle out of a variety of scenes and reminiscences about his life in Ireland, his time in a Catholic school, his first experiences with his sexuality, and his brother's mental breakdown. The second half of the book centers around his relationship with his future wife Olivia, her past, and her former lovers. Calling to mind Joyce's Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man for Dan Ruttle's love-hate relationship with Ireland, and the stylistic innovations employed by Higgins, Scenes from a Receding Past is a masterpiece from one of Ireland's greatest contemporary writers.

In this bawdy memoir, Irish author Aidan Higgins dissects the pretensions of a Catholic family in County Kildare. He examines the mystery of growing up, his rearing on a run-down estate, the decline of a family fortune, and the wide world that he discovered in London and South Africa.

'Tired of walking in the dream I have returned to the country where I was born half a century ago' - The Higgins family is now dispersed; ' he finds this problematical peace, sharing a bungalow near Brittas in Co Wicklow in an awkward two year tenancy with a school mistress with back back trouble.

This spirited and quirky penman has always set himself apart form the general grind of Irish writing and its set themes, to run along the line of the exposed nerve-system.No other Irish writer has been so obsessed with the terrain inconnu of lost or thwarted love as this odd-man-out.

Considered to be one of the best Irish writers of the twentieth century, Aidan Higgins has earned a reputation throughout Europe as an unusual and astringent prose stylist. This omnibus of selected short fiction is the perfect introduction to the talents of this Irish successor to James Joyce and Samuel Beckett (although Higgins's work is perhaps more reminiscent of his Welsh contemporary Dylan Thomas), and displays Higgins's warmth of language and character. From a melancholy tale of suicide in "North Salt Holdings" to a colorful depiction of J. J. Catchpole's escapades in "Catchpole, " Higgins builds his characters into touching failures who both attract and repulse the reader.

THE BOOK: Flotsam and Jetsam is a selection of prose, some previously unpublished, written over the last thirty five years by one of Ireland's greatest writers. It includes work adapted from earlier novels, short stories and radio plays.