Christopher Fitz-Simon was born into an extraordinary Irish family, with Daniel O'Connell on one side and Orangemen on the other, and his childhood coincided with the Second World War – or, as it was known in the southern Irish state, the Emergency. ELEVEN HOUSES is a crystalline memoir of his family's odd progress through those odd years, an account by turns hilarious and heartbreaking.

Christopher's father was an officer in the British army, serving in the Middle East when war broke out, and the family home in these years was in fact a series of homes, in all four provinces of Ireland. For long periods Christopher and his brother were not enrolled in school, and the commencement of formal education proved a shock after years of the freedom of houses, gardens, lanes and fields.

Drawing on his extraordinarily vivid recall of the places and feelings of those years, Christopher Fitz-Simon tells a story of growing up that is also, in effect, a story of various hidden Irelands during the twilight years of the war. Funny, moving and sharp, it is a childhood memoir like no other.