The Ghost Upon Your Path - Hardcover

McCarthy, John

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593048849 ISBN 13: 9780593048849

Publisher: Bantam Press, 2002

Synopsis

We all have a need to belong, to have a place and people we feel tied to: our nation, our family, our hometown or house. So how come one can find these feelings of belonging in a place that one has never visited before? Is it something about Ireland as a physical entity - its landscape - or its people that offered itself up as a mother's bosom to John McCarthy? Where do the roots come from - the soil or the nation? This is not just another jolly journey meeting those funny Irish people and their eccentric ways. As well as humour and eccentricity this is a look at the other side, the sadness beyond the Craic. With sections on the language, literature, music, politics and religion, we follow John McCarthy as he looks to his past and explores his own relationship with Ireland.

About this title

About the Author

John McCarthy was born and brought up in Hertfordshire. After graduating from the University of Hull, he had a number of jobs, finally settling in television news. He is the author of two non-fiction titles: SOME OTHER RAINBOW, with Jill Morrell, and BETWEEN EXTREMES, with Brian Keenan.

From the Back Cover

Ever since he first visited Ireland with his family twenty years ago, John McCarthy has felt a strong affinity with its people and landscape. Yet in spite of his Irish name, he has never thought of himself as remotely Irish.

Two decades later much about that country has changed. Aware that the Ireland that first attracted him - a place of breath-taking beauty and a culture steeped in its love of language, music and humour - is only a part of the picture, McCarthy sets up home in a wild and isolated corner of County Kerry where his ancestors were living a thousand years before. From here he examines what it means to be Irish from the viewpoint of a small rural community and unravels his own curious sense of belonging to a place he has never before lived in.

Looking back on Ireland's turbulent past, which continues to colour the country today, he realizes that this past nurtured his own family roots too. These roots, he discovers, are still alive and thriving, with a stream of distant cousins receiving him as one of their own.

McCarthy charts his reactions to this impermanent homeland, often finding his thoughts turning in on himself as he tackles some of the ghosts in his own life, particularly the death of his mother during his period of captivity in the Lebanon.

A Ghost Upon Your Path presents an unsentimentalized picture of Irish people and the issues confronting their country in the twenty- first century. This is a book about change and continuity, betrayal and loss, identity and displacement. Above all, it is about commitment to community and a tribute to the strength and character of the ordinary people McCarthy meets.

Edition details

• Publisher: Bantam Press
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0593048849
• ISBN 13: 9780593048849
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 359