Hedgecutter's Son

He shaped hedges like a man who had discovered Cubism on a working-class Dublin street.

Timmie Crowley cut privets for a living in Finglas, carving angles no one had seen before. He played accordion until the neighbours crowded into the kitchen. He told stories that made a whole street lean in.

He also carried a wound from a Kerry altar that he never once put into words.

The Hedgecutter's Son is Trevor Crowley's account of growing up inside that house - between his father's fire and his mother's stillness, between chaos and comedy and the drink that came earlier in the day each year. A boy who learned to read the weather in a room before anyone spoke, and who found his way out through his own legs.

At sixteen, on a fog-blind morning in Crumlin with no crowd and no cameras, he ran the fastest mile any boy his age had ever run. Three days later, a full scholarship offer from Villanova arrived in the post. He never took it.

What came instead spanned three countries: Vidal Sassoon's Bond Street, won with a single line about his father's hedges. A Galway salon at the height of the Celtic Tiger, where Maureen O'Hara asked him to make her hair punk. Then the fraudster, the crash, the phone call mid-haircut that ended his marriage, and three silent months in a monastery.

A memoir of inheritance, ruin, and a forgiveness fifty years in the making.