Sand in Strange Places

By turns savage, funny, and painfully honest, Sand in Strange Places is an unfiltered memoir of growing up in civil-strife-torn Northern Ireland during the late 1960s and early 1970s — a place defined by religious zealotry, small-town myopia, and country-and-western-fuelled alcoholism. It is also the story of one boy’s escalating determination to lose his virginity and to get out.

It recounts a childhood shaped by fear, repression, and contradiction: surviving a brutal boarding-school education, narrowly avoiding expulsion, and once facing the threat of having his testicles cut off by a British soldier. Richard gives a frank account of the physical and sexual abuse he endured at a supposedly elite, now long closed, preparatory school.

As an only child, he also negotiates the hard love and relentless expectations of parents who regarded parenthood as an investment. His journey from short trousers to flannels charts his fall from academic prodigy to failure, accompanied by a bumpy sexual coming-of-age, a brief and capricious rock’n’roll career, and how he achieved a literary recognition shared by only two others: Oscar Wilde and Samuel Beckett.

Despite all this, Richard retains a fierce affection for the country of his birth — but there’s no way on God’s green earth that he would ever go back to live there again.