'Memories aren't true. But you can be true to them.' The Nicotine Cat and Other People is a scrupulously truthful and wildly imaginative memoir by one of Ireland's most singular poets and comic writers. Augustus Young darts through memories of his childhood in Cork, his working life in London and the life he now leads in a curious town on the French-Spanish border. His subjects include Father Dinneen's wonderful Irish Dictionary, the philosophers Kierkegaard and David Hume, a Scottish artist called Welsh, Joab Comfort, who knows everything, and Alban Perfide, a surely imaginary novelist living out his own fiction. The Nicotine Cat and Other People is a wise book with a low centre of levity.