Colours ([Updated ed.])

"Colours", however, is more than just a memoir about the formative years of someone born in the epicentre of political and sectarian conflict.

McDonald time travels in two directions: first, back to the dark days of Ulster's violent past; second, into the twenty-first century, using some of the key incidents of his boyhood and youth to compare the Ireland of the past with the Ireland of today.

It is a journey that takes him from the GPO in Dublin, a revered site in the history of Irish republicanism where the 1916 Easter Rising was launched, to the sex shops and swinging parties of postmodern hedonistic Dublin.

Filled with football thugs, terrorists, paedophile priests, abuse survivors, drug dealers, comic writers and modern-day martyrs, "Colours", however, is more than just a memoir about the formative years of someone born in the epicentre of political and sectarian conflict.