A Very Strange Man

This is a love story, set in the Irish literary world between 1986 and 2015. When they were first introduced by the poet Derek Mahon, Alannah Hopkin was an arts journalist turned full-time writer and Aidan Higgins, twenty-three years her senior, was a literary stylist, often cited as the heir to Ireland's great Modernist tradition. They wrote steadily during their twenty-nine years together, but their careers could not have been more different: while Aidan focused on fiction and memoirs, Alannah prioritised work that paid the bills. This gave Aidan the most stable and productive years of his life. But as his eyesight failed and his memory began to fade, Alannah became his carer and had to fight to keep her own writing career alive.

Drawing from diaries and notebooks, and correspondence with writers such as Samuel Beckett, Alice Munro and Harold Pinter, this is a unique record of a major Irish writer. From the joyful honeymoon years – filled with launches, festivals and visits to their Kinsale home by Richard Ford, Edna O'Brien and other literary legends – to the increasingly difficult years of Aidan's decline, Hopkin tells their story candidly and without commentary. She shows us how, in spite of all, they remained the best of friends, in love until Aidan's very last breath.

A Very Strange Man is an exceptional piece of writing, objective and authoritative, personal, honest and moving.



ALANNAH HOPKIN is based in southwest Ireland. She is The 2020 Frank O'Connor International Fellow. Her story collection The Dogs of Inishere was published by Dalkey Archive Press in 2017. Her stories have appeared in the London Magazine and The Cork Literary Review, among others, and have been short-listed for the RTÉ Short Story Award. She has published two novels with Hamish Hamilton.



I can't remember when I've read such a moving memoir, or one written with such raw honesty ... It’s also compelling; I couldn’t put it down. It stands out for the clear-eyed view of a wife who doesn’t shy away from sometimes portraying herself in an unfavourable light.



a subtle and memorable book ...  clear-eyed and candid, but generous too and wise



Powerful and moving. Above all, this is a book about the emotional challenges of caring for someone with dementia – proving that grief really is the price we pay for love.



Your book of the year?

So far, A Very Strange Man, by Alannah Hopkin. This is a strangely consoling memoir, and a very rare thing, being an accurate, candid, and moving book about what it is like to be a writer and to live with a writer. I began it the other morning outside in the sun and finished it some hours later, with a mild sunburn and a sense of great gratitude.



‘among the richest accounts I’ve ever read of lives devoted to writing.’



Hopkin’s straightforward approach suits the biographical record, but her writing comes into its own whenever she exercises her gift for topographical evocation: “Every tiny stone-walled field had a wealth of meadow grasses and wild flowers”