Every Single Minute

Following on from the success of ‘The Speckled People’, Hugo Hamilton's new memoir recounts the summer he spent working at a local harbour in Ireland, at a time of tremendous fear and mistrust.

Young Hugo longs to be released from the confused identity he has inherited from his German mother and Irish father, but the backdrop of his mother’s shame at the hands of Allied soldiers in the aftermath of the Second World War, along with his German cousin’s mysterious disappearance somewhere on the Irish West Coast and the spiralling troubles in the north, seems determined to trap him in history. In an attempt to break free of his past, Hugo rebels against his father’s strict and crusading regime and turns to the exciting new world of rock and roll, still a taboo subject in the family home.

His job at the local harbour, rather than offering a welcome respite from his speckled world, entangles him in a bitter feud between two fishermen — one Catholic, one Protestant. Hugo listens to the missing persons bulletins going out on the radio for his German cousin, and watches the unfolding harbour duel end in drowning before he can finally escape the ropes of history.

The childhood world of Hugo Hamilton is a confused place. His father, a brutal Irish nationalist, demands his children speak Gaelic at home whilst his mother, a softly spoken German emigrant who escaped Nazi Germany at the beginning of the war, encourages them to speak German. All Hugo wants to do is speak English. English is, after all, what the other children in Dublin speak. English is what they use when they hunt down Hugo (or Eichmann as they dub him) in the streets of Dublin, and English is what they use when they bring him to trial and execute him at a mock seaside court. Out of this fear and confusion Hugo tries to build a balanced view of the world, to turn the twisted logic of what he is told into truth. It is a journey that ends in liberation but not before this little boy has uncovered the dark and long-buried secrets that lie at the bottom of his parents' wardrobe.

Hugo Hamilton, the internationally acclaimed author of ‘The Speckled People’ and ‘Sailor in the Wardrobe’, turns his hand back to fiction with a compelling drama tracing Berlin’s central historical importance throughout the twentieth century.

1945. At the end of the second world war in Berlin, a young mother loses her two-year-old boy in the bombings. She flees to the south, where her father finds a young foundling of the same age among the refugee trains to replace the boy. He makes her promise never to tell anyone, including her husband—still fighting on the Russian front—that the boy is not her own. Nobody will know the difference.

2008. Gregor Liedmann is a Jewish man now in his sixties. He’s an old rocker who ran away from home, a trumpet player, a revolutionary stone-thrower left over from the 1968 generation. On a single day spent gathering fruit in an orchard outside Berlin with family and friends, Gregor looks back over his life, sifting through fact and memory in order to establish the truth. What happened on that journey south in the final days of the war? Why did his grandfather Emil disappear, and why did the gestapo torture Uncle Max? Here, in the calmness of the orchard, along with his ex-wife Mara and son Daniel, Gregor tries to unlock the secrets of his past.

In his first novel since the best-selling memoir ‘The Speckled People’, Hugo Hamilton has created a truly compelling story of lost identity, and a remarkable reflection on the ambiguity of belonging.

In this remarkable book, Hugo Hamilton tells the story of individuals caught up in the turbulent last days of World War II. Stationed in Czechoslovakia, lovers Bertha Sommer and Officer Franz Kern long to escape from the war and its consequences, but they are trapped between the advancing Red Army and the fear of their own system, which punishes desertion with death.

Meanwhile, an American contemporary, living in Germany, sets out on a mission to find the exact location of the last shot fired in the war, in a personal attempt to close this horrific chapter in humanity’s history.