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.
