Trading Fate

Fourteen-year-old Patricia Walsh, her mother, father, and six siblings, scratched out a living in the stone fields of County Galway, Ireland. Colum Walsh supported the family as a stonemason building estate structures and repairing the fences of an…

There’s a saying we have in Ireland that you’d nearly think was coined for Colm Tóibín’s novel Brooklyn. Namely, if you’ve the name of getting up early in the morning you can lie till lunchtime. And it seems to me that Tóibín lay too long when he wrote Brooklyn.…

On a July day nearly 130 years ago, an unknown and homesick young Irish writer trudged along a busy London street. He stopped suddenly and stood still, for he thought he could hear the tinkling of water in the midst of the bustling thoroughfare. He followed the sound and found he was looking in a shop window. There…

The past, present and future happily coexist on my workplace doorstep. I’d written about the past in four books, but it was the future that caught my eye one day in the form of a crane, standing stark against a grey Dublin sky.

I work in a newspaper in the city centre, on Talbot Street. During my lunch break, I would leave the office and walk past the…

Michael Collins sat hunched over the small office desk, studying the papers before…