Description 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.
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.
