Description “Wherever you went to school you’ll also think you went with Alice Taylor, to a magic world of Irish childhood.” Maeve Binchy
“A delightful evocation of Irishness and of the author’s deep-rooted love of ‘thevery fields of home’, this picture of bucolic life in an earlier time, with its rituals of religion and the antics of local characters, has universalappeal.” Publishers Weekly
“One of the most richly evocative and moving portraits of childhood [ever] written ... A journey every reader will treasure and will want to read over and over again”. Boston Herald
“Like all the best provincial writing, it is universal and, like all the best bucolic writing it is full of ‘characters’ ... Alice Taylor is the warmest, most vivacious person you could hope to meet... She reminds us of that time when the only fertiliser that was spread on the earth came out of the rear ends of animals and it was still possible to swim in the rivers and call on one another without invitation.” The Mail on Sunday
Author Alice Taylor is the biggest-selling author ever published in Ireland. Her first memoir of country life, To School Through the Fields, was published in 1988 and has become acknowledged internationally as a classic account of childhood; its sequels, Quench the Lamp, The Village, Country Days and The Night Before Christmas have also been bestsellers.
In 1997 her first novel, The Woman of the House, also established her as a bestselling novelist, and was followed in 1999 by a sequel, Across the River.
The biggest-bestseller ever published in Ireland, a universal classic of recollective writing which has been published in translation in many countries from Japan to Poland.
Irish cottages, the pleasures of walking in autumnal woods, a hens' hatching house and a country garden, these are just some of the elements in this varied patchwork quilt of views of rural life.
"Beautifully written; she gently and accurately writes about old age, death, the countryside and animals. Poetry that will bring a smile to the face of a reader, or leave them thinking about their own mortality..." Examiner
"Infused with wit and lyricism . . . Taylor describes the past vividly and without complaint as years of hard labor for herself, parents and siblings, making clear that the days also were full of fun shared with neighbours in the close-knit community." Publisher's Weekly
"A delightful story about Fairyland . . .suitable both for adults to read to young children and for beginning readers to tackle themselves." Cork Examiner
Once-vibrant villages and towns are empty, their former inhabitants now in housing estates built in the surrounding countryside, from which they emerge to drive their children to school and crawl on traffic-choked roads to go to work. No one walks to the school or shops, and most of the village shops have been put out of business by hypermarkets and shopping centres that stand surrounded by massive car parks beside main roads. Village post offices, once vital social gathering places, have been closed.
In a series of vignettes of life in her own village, Alice Taylor reasserts the priorities of public space and social community. The Parish evokes and explores the positive values of community, values that could be renewed and reinvigorated in a present and future that achieves harmony between relative affluence and the pressing need to respect the environment.
