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

'Destined to be a classic' Sunday Independent
'Gabriel Byrne tells his story brilliantly' - Edna O'Brien
'Dazzles with unflinching honesty' Washington Post
'An absolutely marvellous book' - Colm Tóibín

Born to working-class parents and the eldest of six children, Gabriel Byrne harboured a childhood desire to become a priest. Four years later, Byrne had been expelled from an English seminary and he quickly returned to his native Dublin. 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.

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, often through the lens of addiction. Hilarious and heartbreaking Walking With Ghosts is a lyrical homage to the people and landscapes that ultimately shape our destinies.

"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