"The Journey Home" by Dermot Bolger

It is hard to believe that it has taken nearly 18 years for this book to be published in the United States. It appeared in Great Britain in 1990 and surely deserves every accolade that great literature warrants.

In summary, the story captures the conflict of young people caught between traditional and historical Ireland and its emergence as a strong economic nation within the European Union. It is a rather disturbing story, but written so extraordinarily well that the reader is rewarded by its literary excellence.

I would love to listen to English majors critique this author's method of structuring the story around three times without the usual clear demarcations. Admittedly, I will have to read it again and possibly, even more times, before I can even understand how he transitions from the present to the past.

Over and above the structure of the story is his densely sentence structure in which he describes ever so finely scenery, emotions, and events. The author's background as a poet and playwright seemed to support his incredible use of such precise sentence structure and words.