I recently read this book and enjoyed immensely. Tasmanian novelist Christopher Koch travels to Ireland to find the birthplaces of his two maternal great-great-grandmothers; one a convict sentenced to transportation and the other one a free settler. The book is full of history and knowledge, all told in a flowing style of writing. I hope that the next reader will enjoy it as much as I did.

This book is sent as part of an international sweepstake. I hope that the next reader will enjoy it as much as I did.

Yipes, it looks like I am the winner of the Australian Literature Sweepstakes! Although AnitaMac doesn't say that is the sweepstakes that she is sending it for it is the only one that I have entered recently. Thanks so much Anita. This looks like a perfect choice for me because I do love books set in Ireland. And I see that this author wrote The Year of Living Dangerously which I have never read but it is a movie that I still remember these many years later.

This book is so much more than a travel memoir. Writer Christopher Koch weaves in history from both Australia and Ireland, descriptions of both lands, tales about folk singers and folk songs and his own family's heritage. Although Koch is new to me as a writer I loved the movie made from his book The Year of Living Dangerously. Given how much I enjoyed this book I will be looking for more written by him.

Koch grew up in Tasmania which, when it was Van Dieman's Land, was the place to which many convicts were transported in the 1800s. One of his great-great-grandmothers came out to Tasmania from Ireland of her free will but another great-great-grandmother was a convict sent from Ireland for theft. Certainly the second one was the more colourful but Koch's own mother denied that they had any convicts in their past. The Irish heritage was a source of fascination for Koch and he was well-read on Ireland's history. Although he had spent a few days in Dublin during the 1950s it wasn't until 2000 that he travelled there with his friend, Brian Mooney. Mooney had lived in Ireland for some time and plied his trade as a musician with some of the great Irish folk singers. Through Mooney Koch was able to discover many places not known to the regular tourist. One of Mooney's singing pals was Bobby Clancy (one of the famous Clancy Brothers) and Bobby and his wife took Mooney and Koch to Dungarvan, a town on the coast in Waterford County. Koch wrote this about the area:
At our backs, enclosing the northern side of the bay, is a distant stone sea wall with rows of guesthouses behind, and an old square church tower, small on a promontory. In front of us, as we walk, out on the horizon beyond the esplanade, is another promontory, enclosing the bay in the south. Very long and low under the big sky, it extends for many miles, ending in a lion-shaped headland on the Atlantic. It's a place of far, coloured fields and trees: a promontory of dreaming beauty. A second neck of land extends from it towards us: treeless, sandy, and like a yellow ribbon....But it's the main, distant promontory that holds my gaze, with its patchwork of fields in every shade of green and tawny yellow, and the microscopic trees on its top almost black, stamped against the sky. It glows behind sea-mist and the hazes of afternoon; it dreams outside modern Ireland, and is surely much farther from Dungarvan and its bars and patisseries than can be measured in miles or kilometres.

After reading this I yearn to go back to Ireland. It's been over 20 years since I was there but I remember those landscapes.

Thanks AnitaMac for sending this to me. I was going to send it back to Australia for another sweepstakes winner but I have received some requests for it and it isn't a book that is readily available in Canada so I am going to keep it circulating here.

I am going to take this book to the Winnipeg BookCrossers get together at 5:30 today. If no-one at the meeting claims it you can find it on the Winnipeg OBCZ shelf which is located at Cafe d'Amour.

I picked this up at our meeting last month.

I loved reading this book. I've never been to Australia or Ireland but now am even more intrigued by the history of each.

I'll be taking this book on an adventure to the east of Phoenix this afternoon and will leave it somewhere it will hopefully find a new reader.