Groundwork

In this novel Robert Welch calls up voices bearing witness to some of the seismic historical events that continue to disturb the Irish psyche. Focusing on the province of Munster, and panning back and forth in time, Welch sets the Condons and O'Dwyers in periods of great national convulsions - the Elizabethan conquest, the Famine, emigration, the struggle for Irish independence. It is their voices - individual, intimate, shockingly immediate - and the voices of their English masters that let us hear and understand the human experience that lies below and between the lines of written history.