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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 a 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.
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.