Unusually for an Irish autobiography, The Yew Tree at the Head of the Strand is a celebration of the author's parents.

Professor Brian Cosgrove, head of the Department of English at NUI Maynooth, grew up in Newry or I·r Cinn Trβ. He uses the direct translation of the old Irish placename as the title for his book. "My mother's death figures prominently in the book and yew trees also symbolise graveyards," he says.

The Newry of his youth, in the 1940s and 50s, was "predominantly Catholic and sometimes fiercely nationalist'". From the lively atmosphere of his father's pub to the broadening of horizons at the Queen's University Belfast, Brian Cosgrove writes about a childhood and adolescence brightened by comics, storybooks and films, seaside summer holidays in Warrenpoint with his brothers and sisters and visits to his Uncle The book ends as Cosgrove graduates from QUB, aged 21 years. He says he was primarily interested in his formative years and the sectarian society from which he emerged. "I try to look at this objectively," he says.

His appreciation of the merits of his father, Joe, "a hard-working, deeply thoughtful family man" and his mother Harriet, an "ordinary/extradordinary woman", restores some equilibrium after a stream of recent Irish autobiographies where parents came in for more criticism than praise, he points out.

The Yew Tree at the Head of the Strand is published by Liverpool University Press, £12.99 sterling paperback.