Highlight: The Boy at the Gate Book: A Memoir by Danny Ellis

The Boy at the Gate (Skyhorse Publishing, September 2013):

In 1950s Ireland eight-year-old Danny Ellis was abandoned by his mother and interred in Ireland’s notoriously brutal Artane Industrial School. Inside its gates, music sustained him in his struggle to survive.

“[A] powerful debut memoir. . .  That Ellis uses the narrative to unearth a deliberately forgotten past makes for compelling reading. But what makes his work even more affecting is the way he uses his story to liberate the voices of otherwise forgotten children who endured ‘one of the most abusive and brutal institutions in Ireland.’ Heartbreak at its most bittersweet.”—Kirkus Reviews