A train journey prompts a flow of memories – a perfect childhood garden, a father obsessed with catching animals, the background noise of the Troubles – sensations retold, felt again at second hand. Weaving through early-morning milk runs, the effects of redundancy, intense evangelical meetings, dressing up, and the desire for literary enlightenment, these essays contemplate how our experiences make us who we are.
Rooted in his recollections of growing up in 1980s Belfast, Colin Graham traces connections across his childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, and tells the story of his fractured relationship with his father. In a vivid series of reconstructions, Sensation examines the entangled elements of a life.
Colin Graham’s books include Ideologies of Epic, Deconstructing Ireland, and (as @BorderIrish) I am the Border, So I am. His book Northern Ireland: 30 Years of Photography won the Michael J. Durkan Prize and was an Observer Photography Book of the Month. His fiction and memoir-essays have appeared in the Dublin Review, the Edinburgh Review,and elsewhere, and he was formerly editor of the Irish Review. Graham presents the My Identity podcast for ARINS and the Royal Irish Academy, and farms sheep in the Dublin mountains. He is Professor of English at Maynooth University.
Available to pre-order!
‘Poised, elegant, textured, and deeply insightful. The author’s inner life, with all its private intimacies and anguishes, is conveyed with a prose style that is both graceful and contained’ * Niamh Campbell
‘An erudite and deeply humane study of class, work, faith, nature, art, and, most of all, of the acutely moving estrangement of father and son. These supremely articulate and evocative essays are as alert to the processes of memory as they are to the moments, people, and places they examine. Here is the sensate world, from fish and birds to Shostakovich and sheep farming, given with tenderness and in luminous detail’ * Stephen Sexton
'Composed with precision and clarity, Colin Graham's pristine sentences set the past glimmering vividly. A transporting, unforgettable experience' * Doireann Ní Ghríofa
Author photo: Finn Richards
Cover design: Tom Etherington
Publication date: September 2026
ISBN: 978-1-9161509-8-0
RRP: €15.00
Publicity: Peter O’Connell, peter@peteroconnellmedia.com
A train journey prompts a flow of memories – a perfect childhood garden, a father obsessed with catching animals, the background noise of the Troubles – sensations retold, felt again at second hand. Weaving through early-morning milk runs, the effects of redundancy, intense evangelical meetings, dressing up, and the desire for literary enlightenment, these essays contemplate how our experiences make us who we are.
Rooted in his recollections of growing up in 1980s Belfast, Colin Graham traces connections across his childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, and tells the story of his fractured relationship with his father. In a vivid series of reconstructions, Sensation examines the entangled elements of a life.
Colin Graham’s books include Ideologies of Epic, Deconstructing Ireland, and (as @BorderIrish) I am the Border, So I am. His book Northern Ireland: 30 Years of Photography won the Michael J. Durkan Prize and was an Observer Photography Book of the Month. His fiction and memoir-essays have appeared in the Dublin Review, the Edinburgh Review,and elsewhere, and he was formerly editor of the Irish Review. Graham presents the My Identity podcast for ARINS and the Royal Irish Academy, and farms sheep in the Dublin mountains. He is Professor of English at Maynooth University.
Available to pre-order!
‘Poised, elegant, textured, and deeply insightful. The author’s inner life, with all its private intimacies and anguishes, is conveyed with a prose style that is both graceful and contained’ * Niamh Campbell
‘An erudite and deeply humane study of class, work, faith, nature, art, and, most of all, of the acutely moving estrangement of father and son. These supremely articulate and evocative essays are as alert to the processes of memory as they are to the moments, people, and places they examine. Here is the sensate world, from fish and birds to Shostakovich and sheep farming, given with tenderness and in luminous detail’ * Stephen Sexton
'Composed with precision and clarity, Colin Graham's pristine sentences set the past glimmering vividly. A transporting, unforgettable experience' * Doireann Ní Ghríofa
Author photo: Finn Richards
Cover design: Tom Etherington
Publication date: September 2026
ISBN: 978-1-9161509-8-0
RRP: €15.00
Publicity: Peter O’Connell, peter@peteroconnellmedia.com
