A novel kind of book launch

A BOOK launch without the author is a fairly unusual event understandably enough, death is just about the only thing that keeps most writers from coming along to bask in the limelight.

Patricia Avis doubtless would have enjoyed the long delayed launch party of her book Playing The Harlot on Tuesday night in the Adam Suite at the Shelbourne Hotel. Once a lover of the poet Philip Larkin, the twice married Avis, who died in 1977, was an angry young women of the 1950s and moved in a very literary circle that included Kingsley Amis, Thomas Kinsella, Sean O'Faolain and, of course, Conor Cruise O'Brien.

Her second husband, the poet Richard Murphy, was at this week's launch as was her daughter Emily and many of her old friends including John Mulcahy, Anthony Cronin, Michael D Higgins, Imogen Stuart, Ben Kiely. There was much discussion about who was who in this thinly disguised roman a clef. Indeed, when the author first presented it for publication in 1963 it was turned down because the publisher rather huffily considered that "it slandered his friends." Lennie Goodings, head of Virago publishing, came from London and remarked that "book launches in Dublin are known in London publishing circles to be such fun that there's a lot of fighting in the oft ice over who gets to come.

Emily, who is a chef, arrived from her new home in South Africa via London for her mother's launch, and she brought some friends including the composer Trevor Jones, who was last here when he was writing the music for In The Name Of The Father and Duncan Kenworthy, the producer of Four Weddings And A Funeral. He was looking rather pleased with himself as all his schmoozing in Cannes had paid off he had just heard that he got the financing "a snip at £6 million" for his new movie Lawn Dogs, which he intends to shoot in the US this summer.