A personal portrait on the nature of memory and loss

In The Dark Room, by Brian Dillon, Penguin Ireland, €24.

When Brian Dillon's mother remarked that it was odd her teenage son had developed psoriasis, a skin complaint normally associated with patients of a nervous disposition, he was amazed that she had failed to realise that he “lived in a state of perpetual agitation, and that the source of my fear was precisely my inexplicable itch'‘.

His fear was triggered by the sight ...