Booking Passage: We Irish & Americans - Softcover

Lynch, Thomas

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0099428199 ISBN 13: 9780099428190

Publisher: Vintage, 2006

Synopsis

In February of 1970, Thomas Lynch, aged twenty-one, bought a one-way ticket to Ireland. He landed in the townland of Moveen, at the edge of the ocean in West Clare, outside the thatched cottage that his great-grandfather had left late in the nineteenth century with a one-way ticket to America. Tommy and Nora Lynch, Thomas Lynch's elderly, unmarried, distant cousins welcomed the young American 'home'. In the words of the author, 'it changed my life'.

Booking Passage is part travelogue, part cultural study, part memoir and elegy, part guidebook for what Lynch calls 'fellow pilgrims' working their way through their own and the larger histories. It is a magnificent hymn of praise to Ireland.

About this title

Review:

"A curious and engaging series of pieces which retain a personal and historical flavour...while he is excellent on Irish history and the immigrant experience" (Stephanie Merritt Observer)

"By turns diverting, evocative and provocative, Booking Passage gets to grips with all the muddle and multiplicity of its author's lifelong concerns. It does so, to our enjoyment, in a spirit of discernment and delight'" (Patricia Craig Independent)

"Heartfelt and artfully expressed" (Scotland on Sunday)

"There are some beautiful observations about what it means to embrace a new culture, while holding on to, and romanticising, an old one...[with] lyrical and moving descriptions of Ireland, Irishness and the linguistic consequences of American cultural imperialism" (Time Out)

"Profound, funny and immensely moving" (Sunday Times)

From the Publisher:

I'm in awe of Thomas Lynch's way with language: the plain-spoken honesty of this poet's prose' Elmore Leonard

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0099428199
• ISBN 13: 9780099428190
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320