Description:
A writer's return to the old country reveals the binding continuities of family, faith, and language. "A deeply thought-out book filled with poetry, pathos, triumph and lots of Irish laughter."Publishers Weekly "So, Tom that went and Tom that would come back!" is how Nora Lynch greeted the young American Thomas Lynch in 1970, at the edge of the ocean in West Clare, outside the cottage that his great-grandfatheranother Thomas Lynchhad left nearly a century before on a one-way ticket to America. In thirty-five years and dozens of return trips to Ireland, Lynch has found a template for the larger world inside the small one, the planet in the local parish. The neighbors and characters he… found therespinsters and farmers, local heroes, poets, clergy, and corner boystaught him to look, as Montaigne said we ought, for "the whole of Man's estate" in every man. Part memoir, part cultural study, Booking Passage is a brilliant, often comedic guidebook for those Lynch calls "fellow travelers, fellow pilgrims" making their way through the complexities of their own lives and times.
Author bio:
Thomas Lynch is the author of three collections of essays, Bodies in Motion and at Rest, The Undertaking, which was shortlisted for the 1997 National Book Award, and Booking Passage. His poetry collections include Grimalkin and Other Poems and Still Life in Milford. He lives and works in Milford, Michigan, where he is the funeral director, and in West Clare where he keeps an ancestral cottage.