This is a love story, set in the Irish literary world between 1986 and 2015. When they first met - introduced one evening by the poet Derek Mahon - Alannah was an arts journalist becoming a full-time writer and Aidan, twenty-three years her senior, was a highly-regarded literary stylist, often cited as the heir to great Irish Modernist tradition. They wrote steadily during most of the twenty-nine years they were together, but their careers could not have been more different. While Aidan, described as 'a giant of Irish literature', focussed on his highly acclaimed fiction and memoirs, Alannah prioritised work that paid the bills. In doing so, she provided Aidan with the most stable and productive years of his life. These were the good times, but as Aidan's eyesight faded and dementia took hold of him, Alannah, as his sole care-giver, had to fight for the time and energy to keep her own writing career alive.
Drawing from personal diaries and notebooks, Aidan's famous sketches and reviews and his correspondence with writers such as Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter and Alice Munro, this is a unique record of the legacy of a major Irish writer. From the initially joyful honeymoon years - filled with launches, festivals and visits to their Kinsale home by Richard Ford, Edna O'Brien and other fellow writers - to the challenging and sometimes dark years of Aidan's physical and mental decline, Hopkin tells their story candidly and 'without commentary'. She shows us how, in spite of all, they remained the best of friends, in love to the last, Alannah reading to him to the end, her hand in his until Aidan's very last breath. A Very Strange Man is an exceptional piece of writing, objective and authoritative, but also personal, honest and moving.