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A writer's return to the old country
reveals the binding continuities of family, faith, and language.
"So, Tom that went and Tom that would come back!" is
how Nora Lynch greeted the young American Thomas Lynch in
1970, at the edge of the ocean in West Clare, outside the
cottage that his great-grandfather—another Thomas Lynch—had
left nearly a century before on a one-way ticket to America.
In thirty-five years and dozens of return trips to Ireland,
Lynch has found a template for the larger world inside the
small one, the planet in the local parish. The neighbors and
characters he found there—spinsters and farmers, local
heroes, poets, clergy, and corner boys—taught him to
look, as Montaigne said we ought, for "the whole of Man's
estate" in every man.
Part memoir, part cultural study, Booking Passage is
a brilliant, often comedic guidebook for those Lynch calls
"fellow travelers, fellow pilgrims" making their way through
the complexities of their own lives and times.
Thomas Lynch is the author of the
National Book Award finalist The Undertaking and Bodies
in Motion and at Rest. He lives in Milford, Michigan.
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