O Come Ye Back to Ireland, Niall Williams & Christine Breen (Soho,1987) ***

This book is about a couple's adventures in County Clare, Ireland but is non-fiction, even though it reads very much like a novel. Niall, from Dublin, and Christine, from New York, met each other as graduate students in Literature at University College Dublin and were married two years later in New York, where they each found jobs with publishing houses. Uncomfortable with their yuppie existence in Manhattan, they decided to return to Ireland and to take up farming at Kiltumper, a fifty acre farm in western Clare where Chris's grandfather was born. The book is an account of their first year on the farm, where they had to deal with harsh weather, isolation, a primitive cottage, and their lack of knowledge about farming and country living. They battle rain and mud and cold while trying to grow their own vegetables, raise their own chickens and cut their own peat for their cottage's solitary stove and heater. In spite of many hardships, they discover themselves and, through their neighbors, the soul of Ireland that first year, and reward the reader with a story that appeals to those universal yearnings to go back to the land, back to ones roots. You'll be taken enough with their story to send you back to the bookstore for their later books, When Summer's in the Meadow and The Luck of the Irish: Our Life in County Clare, in which they describe their life at Kiltumper following that first difficult year.