Memoir: Many have been called upon to write their memoirs. After all, everyone has a story to tell. However, few have a story worth writing nor the flair to write it. Brendan Lynch - whose two previous books, Green Dust and Triumph of the Red Devil: The 1903 Irish Gordon Bennett Race, indulged his passion for motor racing - has what it takes.
His story, cunningly written in the second person, transcends categorisation as memoir and embraces all the finesse of fiction.
His childhood was spent cocooned in Toomevara, Co Tipperary, as the second World War came and went. The youngest son of the local Garda sergeant, his mother Siobháin, a retired schoolteacher, was the matriarch. Of the generation that was young during the War of Independence, her politics and prejudices were shaped by the time. Acutely aware of her strong views, his teenage years were a constant fight against her certainties.
The struggle to endure the bland decade of the 1950s, and Lynch's awareness of his mother's yearning for a vocation in the family, made flight his only option.
His salvation was a job as a clerical officer with CIÉ. Home was a series of Dublin bedsits. Baggot Street became his playground, McDaid's and Doheny and Nesbitt's his drinking haunts - and Parsons bookshop his university. New friends were made, Brendan Behan and Patrick Kavanagh among them. He had a frontline view of their personal animosity towards each other.
Eventually, censorship and wanderlust drove Lynch out of Ireland. In London, he came under the influence of the peace campaigner, Bertrand Russell, and joined the Ban the Bomb movement. His involvement landed a month's stay in Brixton Prison.
Love, marriage, two daughters, a job in the bank and a daily commute soon smothered him. Divorce followed. His return to Ireland, to attend his elderly mother, brought him back to where he started.
This tender, thoughtful and beautifully written memoir marks a maturing of Brendan Lynch and the coming of age of a writer.
Martin Noonan is an Irish Times journalist
There Might Be a Drop of Rain Yet By Brendan Lynch Currach Press, 223pp. €14.99