"A haunting, beautiful, deeply moving chorus of Irish voices. This book will break your heart and mend it again."
An Irish Life Remembered.
From the builders of Newgrange to the peace walls of Belfast, from the coffin ships of the Famine to the cranes of the Celtic Tiger; an extraordinary chorus of Irish voices, speaking across the centuries, telling the story of a people who endured everything and still sang.
What was it really like to live through the defining moments of Irish history? Not the dates and the battles and the names of the great but the cold dawn of an eviction, the terror of a midnight knock at the door, the taste of the last potato in a starving cabin, and the first sight of a new world from the deck of a fever-ridden ship?
An Irish Life Remembered answers that question in the most intimate way possible. Through the journals of ordinary Irish men, women, and children who lived through extraordinary times.
In this book you'll find twenty voices; farmers and fishermen, scribes and schoolboys, widows and rebels, bus drivers and shop girls each writing in their own moment of crisis and wonder. A teenage girl walks the Doolough pass as the bodies of her neighbours freeze into the snow. A blacksmith's apprentice hides pike heads for the Fenian rising. A Protestant bus driver navigates the bombed streets of Belfast during the Troubles, trying not to hate. A great-grandmother in Connemara, ninety-two years old, looks back on a century of change and passes the story to the generations who come after.
Inside these pages you will witness history as an experience not as dates and facts in a documented report. Just as the history and life experiences of previous generations were told to the next, this book provides a brief window on the times and personal experiences of generations past. This book is the 21st century storyteller that encourages thoughts and awareness of Ireland's past for current generations.
It is an act of remembrance. A hearth to sit beside. A place where the dead speak and the living listen. An opportunity to know and remember the names of the places and ordinary people of Ireland that bore witness to history.
For readers of Sebastian Barry, Colm Tóibín, and John McGahern. For anyone who has ever wondered what it felt like to be Irish in the moments that defined a nation. For everyone who believes that the personal stories of the ordinary are the most extraordinary of all.
The fire is lit. The kettle is on. The voices are waiting. Come in from the cold.
