Dimensions
144 x 222 x 27mm
Dublin is a city much visited and deeply mythologized. Versions of its shabby grandeur live on vividly in the works of its great novelists and playwrights; and the boom and bubble years of the 2000s created a fresh myth of prosperity and a patina of modernity.
But behind the facade Dublin presents to tourists and to multinational business is a much stranger, less coherent and more intriguing cityscape that is bursting with stories.
In Hidden City, Karl Whitney - who has been described as 'Dublin's best psychogeographer since James Joyce' - goes in search of the city's secret places and untold - or only half-told - stories. He haunts the city's edgelands, from his native Tallaght, a marginalized working-class suburb on the south-western fringe, to Loughshinny, along the coast north-east of the city, where he watches raw sewage being pumped into the shallows of the Irish Sea.
He finds secrets and stories near the heart of the city, too: in the underground rivers of the Liberties, and on the eerie sites once earmarked for skyscrapers in Ballsbridge.
Whether he is visiting each of the twenty addresses at which Joyce lived in and around the city, retracing the path a Nigerian teenager walked with his friends before being stabbed to death in the new suburb of Tyrellstown, breaking into an abandoned apartment complex with one of its former residents, or tramping overland beneath the flight path followed by passenger jets descending to the airport, Karl Whitney shows us a Dublin - or a collection of Dublins - that we've never seen before.
Hidden City is a fond, searching and richly engaging portrait of a place that has been hiding in plain sight
