South Donegal native James Harvey's book-singing event for his childhood memoir

Donegal native James Harvey will be signing copies of his childhood memoir about growing up near Mountcharles and postwar London at The Bookmark in Letterkenny Shopping Centre, Saturday, October 18, from noon to 3pm.

As described in Grappling With Ghosts, Harvey was delivered in a thatched Doorin cottage by his grandmother, and wound up writing speeches for American presidents.

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From time as a child in an orphanage, Harvey travelled a rocky road to success. Born in a small cottage beside Donegal Bay and raised in Doorin and a London home wracked by alcoholism and violence, his memoir recreates the strange and remote realities of life in postwar rural Ireland, which had barely emerged from the 19th century, and bomb-shattered London with “armless and legless veterans everywhere you turned.”

An engrossing memoir that grounds the struggles of the Harveys in both Irish history and British snobbery, it takes the reader from the security and serenity of rural Irish life, through the chaos of postwar London, to the emotional anguish of emigration. BlueInk Reviews hails the author’s “storytelling prowess” in this “page-turner.” Foreword Reviews describes a “mature professional voice” that is “poignant” and “fascinating.”