Following a crippling depression and institutionalization

The writer "Desmond" wanders from his native Dublin around an increasingly unrecognizable Europe, and as far as the southern United States, assembling a patchwork of small stories, conversations, love affairs, memories, regrets, and confrontations: "the labyrinth of stories of people whose lives you touch . . . so that your mind becomes like a polychromatic Irish pub."

Whether a series of tragic postcards, a cubist novel, or a memoir shorn of its connective tissue

A Farewell to Prague stands as Desmond Hogan's greatest achievement: a catalog of the moments that justify a life "or shine a light on its emptiness."