A radically different take on memoir... Inventory is a book of hard-won truths, a detailed map of a journey out of the labyrinth, the maze of memories, anecdotes, evasions and secrets… A book of revelations, then, both large and small, its truths reverberate in the imagination long after you finish reading it

Absolutely masterful

Inventory is a remarkable memoir; a work of auto-archaeology, really, in which Darran Anderson disinters his own and his country’s hard pasts, shaking life, love and loss out of the objects of his youth in Northern Ireland. Bleak, tender, inventive and oddly gripping, this is a book of restless ghosts, written in defiance of darkness, and told by means of diving into what Nabokov once called “the dream life of debris”

Important... vividly rendered... Inventory may in fact be above all an exercise in memory -- gathering, questioning, verifying, and identifying the voids. Even when the subjects are difficult to catch, the hunt is always vital and compelling

A portrait of a family and a portrait of a city -- vivid, intense, engrossing, and always beautifully written

A memoir, a microhistory and a crime scene - or, rather, a collection of them... Inventory reads like a dam-burst, then, an overwhelming of Derry, of Northern Ireland, with memory, its coursing rivers, undercurrents, treacherous accumulations... This isn't a book about the Troubles so much as it is a book about disputed borders, about where the city ends and the improvised playgrounds of industrial edge-lands begin, where fantasies of adulthood cross into adult realities, and where the specter of conflict spills over into everyday life

I cried at much of this book, and laughed my belly sore at much of it too. The writing is intoxicating. The sheer fucking poetry of it all, the splendour and the decay, the beauty and the horror; the unearthly, moon-lit sorrow... This book is brave. This book is brilliant. This book will help so many to break silences they should never have been forced to keep, about things they should never have had to live through... We need this book, and by ‘we’ I mean every single bleeding one of us

A finely textured account of [Anderson's] upbringing in a city that Catholics called Derry and many Protestants knew as Londonderry... [Inventory] is an admirable feat of recreation that yanks the past back into clear focus—and, as Brexit calls into question the border arrangements that are part of the peace deal, a timely warning

Processed by Anderson’s restless, roving intelligence and obsessive curiosity, Derry rises from the pages of this book as a place that’s at once intensely familiar and uniquely strange. Crossing the faultlines between family, history and myth, Inventory is a vivid, singular act of memory

I’ve not got words to tell you how good this book is. A memoir, an imagination, a lyric, a history - woven around Derry, its families, legends and its hard, hard story. It is a complete book

A searing memoir about growing up in poverty in Derry

An astonishing window onto a world that has been painted with such limited palettes by decades of news coverage, but also a marvellous poetic reminder that every place is a universe of magical possibility to the perceptive mind. I’ll never forget this book

Anderson recounts with levity and humour his explorations of Derry—burnt-out cars, wastelands on the city’s outskirts, the roof of a church and abandoned houses, all while evading the looming presence of British troops and sectarian conflict... Short, lucid chapters carry the narrative at a comfortable pace... Inventoryshines most when we see a child navigate a gruesome conflict

Inventory is a powerful, palimpsestic map of a wounded landscape that opens up again and again, revealing something new to the observer each time, in tantalising glimpses

Inventory is an endearing portrait of familial resilience, written in some of the most beautiful prose I have ever encountered in an autobiographical work. Every sentence is perfectly constructed, all at once elegantly descriptive and harsh in its grinding realism... The book’s passages and chapters shiver with tension, a copper wire on the brink of snapping loose to slash open your cheeks.

In intimate, beautifully allusive vignettes, Anderson guides readers through his youth... An impressively pensive, impressionistic work from an attentive writer

A tense, atmospheric study of life in a war zone... Anderson's evocative prose takes disasters in stride while measuring their toll with restrained lyricism... A grim but engrossing frontline take on the Troubles

[A] marvellous book

The bitter winter of 1962-3 closed down life for Britain just as Covid is doing today. Juliet Nicolson was a child then and is a scintillating storyteller now. There is not an icicle, politician, scandal or song missing from this engrossing re-creation of times so recently passed. Enchanting and wise, it leaves this message for our future: they survived, and so shall we

This is an absolutely mesmerising book. Where I knew of the events concerned I was fascinated by the vivid retelling, and when I didn't I was utterly gripped

Works fizzingly well on all its many different levels . . . the unity between the national crisis and the family story never falters. The sensuous delight Juliet Nicolson takes in the natural world makes the snow both villain and star of Frostquake

In 1962 East Sussex snowdrifts reached 23ft and in London milkmen made deliveries on skis. The experience shaped the Britain of the 1960s, argues Nicolson in this lively social history

Wonderfully comprehensive

Exhilarating

[An] entertaining account

A micro-history of that extraordinarily cold winter, which, she [Nicolson] argues, changed Britain forever

A wonderful book

Juliet Nicolson's Frostquake is a micro-history of that extraordinarily cold winter, which, she argues, changed Britain forever. Nicolson is a warm guide to that freezing time, weaving together memories of her childhood at Sissinghurst, the nascent Chelsea set scene on the Kings Road, global politics and the Profumo affair

[An] enthralling account of the horrendous winter of 1962/3