Walking with Ghosts is the stunningly evocative memoir by Irish actor and Hollywood star, Gabriel Byrne.

Walking with Ghosts is the stunningly evocative memoir by Irish actor and Hollywood star, Gabriel Byrne.

'Dreamy, lyrical and utterly unvarnished' – Colm Tóibín

As a young boy growing up in the outskirts of Dublin, Gabriel Byrne sought refuge in a world of imagination among the fields and hills near his home, at the edge of a rapidly encroaching city. Born to working-class parents and the eldest of six children, he harboured a childhood desire to become a priest. When he was eleven years old, Byrne found himself crossing the Irish Sea to join a seminary in England. Four years later, Byrne had been expelled and he quickly returned to his native city. There he took odd jobs as a messenger boy and a factory labourer to get by. In his spare time he visited the cinema, where he could be alone and yet part of a crowd. It was here that he could begin to imagine a life beyond the grey world of ’60s Ireland.

He revelled in the theatre and poetry of Dublin’s streets, populated by characters as eccentric and remarkable as any in fiction, those who spin a yarn with acuity and wit. It was a friend who suggested Byrne join an amateur drama group, a decision that would change his life forever and launch him on an extraordinary forty-year career in film and theatre. Moving between sensual recollection of childhood in a now almost vanished Ireland and reflections on stardom in Hollywood and on Broadway, Byrne also courageously recounts his battle with addiction and the ambivalence of fame.

Walking with Ghosts is by turns hilarious and heartbreaking as well as a lyrical homage to the people and landscapes that ultimately shape our destinies.

‘Make no mistake about it: this is a masterpiece . . . poetic, moving and very funny’ – Colum McCann, author of Let the Great World Spin

"Walking With Ghosts is lavish with lyricism, but presents a pretty unvarnished version of its author . . . The book is also a conscious departure: stylistically ambitious, purposefully (and successfully) so" - The Guardian

"Byrne arrives at a truth greater than an honest and sensitive memoir; he verges on a profoundly touching articulation of our short time on earth, time that will make of each of us nothing more or less than a ghost" - Irish Independent

"Destined to be a classic . . . What makes Gabriel Byrne a great writer is that he knows that whether we are wicked or good, few of us get what we deserve" - Sunday Independent

"Structured around an imaginary, haunted visit to the Dublin of his youth, the book does offer sketches from the movie wonderland – John Boorman being bossy on Excalibur, testy encounters with Laurence Olivier in the 1980s – but it is more to do with conjuring up a now-vanished Ireland. The smell of the Guinness brewery. Early acting experiences in a nativity play. The church, everywhere the church" - Irish Times

"A working-class family memoir as well as a meditation on fame and its discontents" - Observer

"[Byrne] writes with much more depth than the typical celebrity memoirist, accessing some of Seamus Heaney’s earthiness and James Joyce’s grasp of how Catholic guilt can shape an artist . . . A melancholy but gemlike memoir, elegantly written and rich in hard experience" - Kirkus (starred review)

"A remembrance of the Ireland Byrne left behind, one which is no longer there" - Hot Press, '2020 Books of the Year'

"Dazzles with unflinching honesty, as it celebrates the exuberance of being alive to the world despite living through pain. [Byrne's] portrait of an artist as a young boy is steeped in nostalgia of the best sort, re-creating the pull of home . . . With this tender book — full of warm and often funny stories — Byrne shows us the depth of his true character" - Washington Post

"In emotional, evocative prose, Walking With Ghosts describes the town outside Dublin where [Byrne] grew up, the oldest of six children crammed into a small house, their father working as a barrel-maker for the Guinness brewery, everyone in each other’s business. They were steeped in Catholicism . . . In passages that are horrifying, then funny, then both, he describes, for instance, learning the story of Adam and Eve from a fire-and-brimstone nun, in a lesson that ends with God declaring to the fallen pair: 'And by the way, your children will be miserable as well.' ('That’s why the world is such an unhappy place,' the nun adds.) . . . Can you go home again? That is the tantalizing question raised by Walking With Ghosts" - The New York Times

"It is at times a heartbreakingly tender excursion between the living and the dead. The actor is an artist of the written as well as the spoken word" - Sunday Independent

"A beautifully judged blend of sparkling anecdotes spliced with the darkest of memories" - The Gloss Magazine

"Actor Byrne channels his fellow countrymen and Ireland's literary masters - Beckett, Heaney, Joyce, Yeats - to create an exceptionally lyrical and expressive memoir about his childhood and early career . . . Bracingly revealing about his struggle with alcoholism, achingly passionate about the Ireland of his youth, and piercingly frank about his acting life, Byrne is a vivid, evocative, and sumptuously compelling memoirist" - Booklist