“My grandmother made dying her life’s work” is the opening sentence and sets the tone and style of the book. Adopted by the Byrne family of Dalkey, he here creates clear and memorable portraits of his parents, grandmother, neighbours, friends and employers. Leonard’s real name was Jack Keyes Byrne, and Home Before Night covers his early life and adulthood up to the time he decided to give up his Civil Service job and become a full-time writer. His two volumes of autobiography, of which this is the first and probably the better, provide powerful, evocative and moving insights into Irish urban working-class family life in the 1930s and 1940s. Hugh Leonard (1926-2009) was among Ireland’s foremost dramatists, especially in the 1960s and 1970s.
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