Books in the Translations 11 series

After the funeral, a grieving son starts reading the diary his dead father had kept during the Second World War. As he turns each page, searching for a trace of the man he remembers, a portrait of an individual unfolds; a figure made both strange and familiar through the handwritten observations, the yearnings and the confessions.

This well-crafted novel is one of the few novels in either Irish or English that explores this generation of Irish people, often termed the "silent" or "lost generation" when over a half-a-million people emigrated, primarily to Britain, to work in the post-war economy there - "building England up and tearing it down again."