Book description
John Boyle was born and raised in Scotland but he could never feel
Scottish. His parents were poor immigrants from the West of Ireland
who came to Scotland to find work and eventually settled in Paisley,
where John was the first of six children.
Galloway Street beautifully captures the poverty and the
rough humour of the family's life in the Paisley tenements, the songs
and stories of their Irish Catholic relatives and the often uneasy
relationships with their Scottish Protestant neighbours. It also shows
how the boy is marked at the age of ten by an extended stay with his
spinster aunt on the remote island of Achill, as he begins to
understand the life his parents left behind.
This is a book about exile and belonging, about the poignancy of
growing up Irish in Scotland, so close to the place your mother still
calls home. It is a truthful, funny and moving evocation of a unique
place and time, experienced through the eyes of a child.
John Boyle left Scotland at nineteen and has lived most of his adult
life abroad. He taught English in Spain and London, managed language
schools in Belgium and Holland, then set up a communications consultancy
in Brussels. Now a writer and columnist, he still does commercial
voiceovers in Brussels, New York and London. He is the author of
Galloway Street
and
Laff
.
