The Invisible Prison

Subtitled Scenes from an Irish Childhood, Pat Boran’s bestselling prose memoir is an evocative and humorous portrait of small-town Ireland in the late 1960s and early 70s, made up of short self-contained scenes which combine to form a unique record of a time and a convincing portrait of a young mind coming to terms with the limits of received wisdom. Part memoir, part social history, part meditation on community itself, The Invisible Prison is, most of all, a celebration of the freedom, innocence and joys of childhood.“Gentle… affectionate… good-humoured… heart-breaking…” — The Irish Times“He writes with a poet’s sensibility… Each individual chapter feels like a short story in itself.” — Peter Sheridan, Books of the Year, Liveline, RTÉ Radio 1“Resolutely amusing and emotionally resonant, Boran’s memoir captures all the excitement and natural curiosity of childhood… ” — Sunday Business Post“Pat Boran’s autobiography, The Invisible Prison, makes the cut for its beautiful, poetic script reminding us what the essence of childhood is all about” — Des Kenny, Books of the Year, Sunday Independent“Pat Boran’s memoir is fresh, new and youthful – he is, after all, still in his 40s – but it is also rooted in an age-old and now- vanished Ireland. This is particularly true of what is, in effect, the foundation fact of his family life: while not yet in her teens, his mother was sent away from her Tipperary home to live with an uncle and aunt in Portlaoise. Being fostered out, to relatives if you were lucky, to wealthier strangers as a kind of slave if you were unfortunate, has been a common experience in this country since the beginnings of our history, so common indeed that the Irish were reputed to practise it more than any other people in the world. Whatever its economic merits, and however kindly the foster parents, the emotional effects of fosterage on a small girl can only be imagined. Her experience, which is vividly evoked by Boran, was Dickensian. She lived with her uncle and aunt on the main street of Portlaoise in an 11-room house and hardware business crammed with “the very nuts and bolts, the grains and pellets, the screws and nails and glues that held the world together and made it work”. When her foster parents died in 1955, she was left alone, ‘surrounded by shadows’. Trying to sell off the stock, she met Nicholas Boran, a 38-year-old who had already spent half his life working in hardware shops up and down the midlands. One of 14 children, he was “in awe of the ready and steady, the dependable, the potent, the not-to-be-swayed or bandied-with resistance of tools”. — Brian Lynch, The IndependentISBN 978 1 906614 15 7 Paperback Also available in Hardback 140 x 216 mm, 262 pp Nov 2009, reissued 2018