Eloquent novel is easy to admire but hard to love

Dublin Palms sees Hugo Hamilton delving into his own past to tell the tale of a nameless narrator and his wife who move back to our capital from Berlin in the 1980s

Hugo Hamilton: there is a reserve at the heart of his narrator Pic: Getty

Fiction: Dublin Palms, By Hugo Hamilton, 4th Estate, €16.45

For his ninth novel, Hugo Hamilton has stuck to the old adage of ‘write what you know’. Dublin Palms sees the writer delving into his own past to tell the tale of a nameless narrator and his wife who move back to our capital from Berlin in the 1980s, starting a family and a business in the city.

Like Hamilton, our narrator is the ...