One Irish Summer

A journalist arrives at Queenstown on an Irish summer morning and watches the ferry disgorge its passengers: not tourists, but Irish-Americans returning home for the first time. They carry new clothes, new accents, new fortunes. They look strangely at the gray skies, the stone walls, the faces of people who are technically their kin. This is the opening movement of a book that functions as both travel narrative and meditation on what emigration does to a people and a place. Curtis moves through the Irish countryside with sharp eyes, recording the landscape that poets have made sacred, the villages caught between old ways and new possibilities, the tension between what Ireland was and what it was becoming. He writes with affection but without sentimentality, observing the economic struggles, the quiet pride, the emigrant's peculiar pain of loving a homeland that no longer quite fits. This is Ireland on the cusp of the twentieth century, still under British governance, still dreaming of independence, captured by an outsider who understood that the most interesting stories live in the spaces between who we were and who we have become.