The Star Factory

This is a shaggy-dog story delivered without once drawing breath: a risky, nerve-wracking, extraordinary performance. The Star Factory of the title was an abandoned mill, full of Piranesian galleries and rusting machinery, which haunted the author as a child; roads converge on Belfast to form a stellar patter, in an ironic benediction of the city's sectarian divisions. But the Star Factory is also a place of the imagination, where history and decaying architecture are turned into stories. And this is a book about growing up in a city that is full of stories, weaving in and out of each other as Carson explores myriad cities of his native town, diving down "the wormhole of memory" into parallel worlds where religion, politics, and the sad magic of the dying shipyards and linen factories take manifold forms.