Sand in Strange Places

Sand in Strange Places is a darkly humorous memoir of growing up in civil-strife-torn Northern Ireland during the late 1960s and early 1970s – a place defined by religious zealotry and country-and-western-fuelled alcoholism. It is also the story of one boy’s determination to survive, lose his virginity and to escape the place. Richard recounts a childhood shaped by repression and contradiction: enduring a brutal boarding-school education – narrowly avoiding expulsion – and once facing the threat of having his testicles cut off by a British soldier. He gives a frank account of the physical and sexual abuse he endured at a supposedly elite preparatory school, now long closed. As an only child, Richard negotiates the hard love and relentless expectations of parents who viewed parenthood as an investment. He relates how his journey from short trousers to flannels took him from academic neo-prodigy to academic failure. And he shares with the reader the often-bumpy sexual road that takes him from boyhood into manhood, his brief but capricious rock’n’roll career, and how he achieved the recognition that only two other writers (Oscar Wilde and Sam Beckett) managed to achieve. Dark and candid, Sand in Strange Places is a story of sex, school, survival, and escape, set against the backdrop of the Irish Troubles.