Eleven Houses / Christopher Fitz-Simon

Christopher Fitz-Simon was born into an extraordinary Irish family, with Daniel O’Connell on one side and Orangemen on the other, and his childhood coincided with the Second World War – or, as it was known in the southern Irish state, the Emergency. Eleven Houses is a crystalline memoir of his family's odd progress through those odd years, an account by turns hilarious and heartbreaking.