This title provides the narrative of George O'Brien's childhood in the somnolent river-valley settlement of Lismore, County Waterford, during the 1950s. It describes the life and surrounding of an only child raised in a close-knit society: the town of Lismore and its inhabitants; the twin empires of Castle and Church; ball-alley, hurling field and point-to-point; and the tides of migration, the lure of foreignness. The village incarnated by George O'Brien is an Ireland in microcosm - post-colonial, myth-haunted, anticipatory - where tensions between the authority of family and community, and an individual's growth, vibrate through the author's prose.