A star called Henry

A Star Called Henry is a novel by the Irish writer Roddy Doyle, published in 1999. It is the first volume of his Last Roundup sequence, and it follows Henry Smart from his childhood in Dublin into the early years of the Irish state.

Henry Smart is born into the tenements of Dublin at the beginning of the twentieth century, to a father who works as a bouncer in a brothel and settles scores for a living, and his childhood is the education the city gives to children like him: survival, theft, and a knowledge of the streets that is more use than school. He joins the Irish Citizen Army while he is still a boy and takes part in the Easter Rising of 1916, and the novel follows him into the Irish War of Independence, where he meets figures of the period including Patrick Pearse, James Connolly and Michael Collins and trains men for the ambush at Soloheadbeg. Doyle tells it in Henry's own voice, which is fast, funny about terrible things and entirely without illusions about the cause he is serving or the men leading it.

The series continued in two further novels, and the three together cover most of the twentieth century.