Janklow & Nesbit UK
This Is The Way

This Is The Way

From Ireland comes a startlingly original voice.

'They was fish says my mother. The Sonaghans and the Gillaroos all was once fish. And you heard of this place Melvin where the families is from. All that's there now is a pond but it was all once a lake where the Sonaghan fish and the Gillaroo fish did live.'

Anthony is a traveller, the son of a Sonaghan father and Gillaroo mother. The feuding families' enmity is a matter of legend, but Anthony has grown up away from his people and is only dimly aware of their rivalry. That is until the blood feud touches him, and he comes to Dublin to lie low.

Here he meets Judith, who shows more interest in his life than anyone before and encourages him to record his stories. But then his uncle Arthur turns up at his doorstep - injured, delirious and apparently on the run, threatening to bring the past and its troubles with him,

In a sustained feat of invention, Gavin Corbett has fashioned an idiom - vivid but innocent - with which to speak for Anthony and his tradition.

This is Anthony's story. But by diffusion it is the story of an entire cultural encounter between and ancient world and our modern age.

Other books by Gavin Corbett