Rencontre with Neil Hegarty

Launched tonight in French translation, Neil Hegarty’s début novel Inch Levels spans fifty years of life in Ireland’s northern borderlands. Patrick Jackson lies on his deathbed in Derry. He recalls a family history touched by the Troubles and marked by secrecy and silence, as well as a striking absence of conventional pieties. He is haunted by a memory of the body of an eight-year-old girl being found on the shoreline of Lough Swilly and as he is visited by different family members, layers of intrigue gradually begin to emerge.

"A perceptive and moving study of remorse and resilience, of the legacy violence leaves behind, and of the intricacies of family life; in the world as Neil Hegarty conjures it, old secrets never die, and what's past is never past." (John Banville)

"The topography of the north-east plays a leading role in the novel, its ragged shoreline, the skerries and islets in foaming waves, silver scree, hillside bracken and heather, all form a stable background to Jackson's ephemeral memories ... There is much to ponder in this exploration of how we view the past." (Sunday Independent)