Conversation with the Sea

By: Hugo Hamilton

Narrated by: Stephen Hogan

'Truly a book for our time' PAUL LYNCH

FROM THE AWARD-WINNING AUTHOR OF THE SPECKLED PEOPLE

Fleeing his failed marriage in Berlin, Lukas Dorn revisits the West of Ireland, the place of his honeymoon two decades earlier. While his former wife is being cancelled at work and his daughter is arrested at a street protest, he tries to make sense of his broken life with a journal as his sole companion.

His inherited memory of the Nazi Holocaust comes face to face with the present when he meets a refugee from a recent warzone. As Lukas communes with the elements in this wild coastal place, he is forced into a confrontation with the past that will carry him to the edge of existence.

Conversation with the Sea speaks with heart-rending tenderness to the present moment, as it explores truth, illusion and the deadly silencing of war in a captivating tale of love in a time of displacement.

'Told with Hamilton's signature purity of tone, an epic story about how love and history intersect.' ANNE ENRIGHT

'I don't think I've ever read a book as wise, or as moving. I will treasure it forever.' DONAL RYAN

'Hypnotic, passionate, urgent ... Hamilton cuts a clean line to the truth of our mindless moment.' PAUL LYNCH©2025 Hugo Hamilton

Critic reviews

I don't think I've ever read a book as wise, or as moving. It's replete with images that I know will stay with me forever: the red dots; the motorcycling couple; the pink-jacketed U-bahn man; the flung suitcases; the women on the truck; and Lukas's almost ghostly, liminal presence in his own story, as he tries and tries to give coherence to the inchoate; to work his grief and trauma into some kind of resolution. His pain and his yearning lift up from every line, and what lines they are. This is a book of Everything: love, family, home, war, migration, loss; at once and by turns gentle and ferocious, luminous and dark, and ultimately filled with hope. I feel changed by this novel, and I will treasure it forever.

Hugo Hamilton has written a magnificent book. Conversation with the Sea is as compulsive as it is lyrical, deeply moving, utterly readable, bursting with life. The plot is devious and seductive; the prose takes your breath away - it towers over contemporary fiction. A triumph.

Hamilton's prose is stripped back but never thin ... he leaves you with images that linger like grit in the eye

No summary can capture the near-perfect beauty of Conversation with the Sea ... It's prose is fresh and clear, yet shadowed by menace ... It's this emotional and moral depth that makes reading Hugo Hamilton so refreshing

One of the book's most striking qualities is its prose ... addictive to read ... Conversation with the Sea is both unsettling and strangely absorbing

A profound meditation ... Conversation with the Sea is a precise, masterly novel that encompasses themes of trauma, displacement, war, history, love, hope, and hopelessness