Ashes to ashes. Or, rather, ashes to monks as Limerick provides the setting for yet another international literary phenomenon. And the author? None other than Frank McCourt's younger brother Malachy, whose memoir, A Monk Swimming, has rocketed to number seven in America's best-seller list within a week of publication.
The book had been turned down by leading European publishers, who claimed they didn't want to be accused of trying to cash in on the hype created by Angela's Ashes, but who probably thought it was too much of the same thing to succeed. Now these same publishers are frantically bidding for the rights to 66-yearold Malachy's memoir of his early life in Limerick and his later days as a barkeeper and actor in New York.
The Americans had shown no such reservations, and Hyperion, Disney's publishing company, promptly acquired it for $600,000, an investment that has already paid off, the book being embraced both by the public and by critics, with the New York Times commenting: "Where Frank is restrained and tragic, Malachy is outrageous and comic."
On this side of the Atlantic, Patrick Walsh of the British agency Christopher Little has already sold the UK rights to HarperCollins (Frank's publishers, too), whose editorial director, Susan Watt, was struck by Malachy's account of being an Irish immigrant in New York "and the way he tackles his demons, drink in particular".
Other publishers are said to be kicking themselves for not taking up the book. "We will end up with auctions because there is so much interest," Patrick Walsh happily says.
Devotees of Angela's Ashes will be interested to see how Malachy, the most outwardly exuberant of the McCourt brothers, deals with the same Limerick childhood, about which, he says, his main emotion "used to be incessant rage. Now, although Ireland has been forgiven, that doesn't mean I have to like it. The institutions let us down - the Government, the Church, the education system all failed us."
In the book he writes: "I did not like being damp all the time. I did not like looking in windows of shops filled with meats, sweets, biscuits, bread, and my eyes bulging, the mouth aching for the chance to chew on something substantial. I did not like being eaten by fleas, gorging themselves on my bitter blood. I did not like having lice and nits in my hair, my arse, my armpits, my eyebrows."
Books, he says, saved the brothers: "A book in Limerick was as rare as gold. If one came into the lane, it passed from hand to hand. I'd read slowly, savouring every word like a hungry boy with a slice of bread."
More than a half-century later, books are obviously still being good to the McCourt brothers.
Is Peter Sheridan about to become Dublin's answer to the McCourts? Well, Macmillan in London has just bought Forty Four, Peter's memoir of growing up on Dublin's northside, for what the author tells me is a "six-figure" sum, and it's estimated that he'll earn an awful lot more when the American and European rights are sold.
Indeed, deals have already been struck for the Danish, Dutch, French, Italian and Swedish rights, while Peter's agent, Darley Anderson, says that the German deal involved a "record sum", with many leading German publishers bidding large amounts.
The title refers to the number of the house on Seville Place, just off Sheriff Street, where Peter, film maker brother Jim and the rest of the Sheridans, grew up. "It's about seventy per cent factual," the author tells me, without elaborating on what's not.
He deliberately didn't read Angela's Ashes before embarking on it, as he didn't want to run the risk of being influenced by another approach to an Irish childhood - though Peter's wasn't marked by the kind of deprivation the McCourts suffered, and his encouraging father was far removed from the flamboyantly destructive paterfamilias in Angela's Ashes.
After his plan to make a film about the Behans fell through when Sean Penn (due to play Brendan) pulled out, Peter is thrilled with the reaction to his memoir. And a film may very well be made of it, most likely directed by brother Jim, though whether they'll play themselves in it is another matter.
Meanwhile, other Irish writers handled by Darley Anderson are doing very well, too. Tyrone Productions, those wonderful folk who gave Riverdance to the world, have bought the television rights to Scalpel, the best-selling medical thriller by Dublin doctor Paul Carson, and are planning a mini-series based on it.
And Anderson is also negotiating book deals for a couple of other aspiring Irish authors. Seemingly the British and international mania for new Irish literature hasn't abated - Irish writers, he says, are still "very sexy" abroad.
And obviously making oodles of money, too. Kavanagh, thou should'st be living at this hour.