Inside Ireland

Eilis Dillon was born into the milieu that made the modern Irish Republic. She draws on layers of family histoiy to trace the nation's past, remembering much of her own life in the process. From the Victorian Dublin of her grandfather, Count Plunkett, and her poet uncle, Joseph Plunkett's part in the Easter Rising and its bitter aftermath, she moves to the beautiful but impoverished Galway of her childhood, to the Sligo where she went to convent boarding school, and to the intricacies of social life in wartime Cork. Eilis Dillon's deep knowledge of the Gaelic tradition gives her a special insight, and her writing glows with poetry, humour, understanding and an infectious love for her native land.
From the proud city of Cork to the walls of Derry, from Killorglin's Puck Fair to the Galway Races, Eilis Dillon's prose is matched and complemented by the brilliantly evocative photographs of Tom Kennedy, whose marvellous eye for detail and brooding sense of place contribute a unique visual dimension to this most compelling of books about Ireland by one of the country's most distinguished novelists.