A powerful, moving book about the heaviness of history land a reckoning with what reconciliation can mean in the present. To read it is to walk with ghosts, to time-travel, to sit with the grandchild of the Irish civil war as she navigates intergenerational trauma. A story told with deep live, empathy and a desire for healing. I am not the same after reading it. CLAIRE MITCHELL

This is a work of eloquent, haunting beauty, a song of touring and revelation that deserves the widest possible audience. This is a story rooted in a place and time, but it is truly the story of all wars in all times. FERGAL KEANE

Ellen McWilliams unlocks the layers of her intergenerational, untold story of revolution and silences embedded deep in West Cork. A Brave, eloquent, ans personal account by a literary scholarship who has already contributed to and the recovery of other Irish women writers' untold narratives of kinship, exile, secrets and displacement. LINDA CONNOLLY

Written in more sorrow than in anger, Ellen McWilliams's meditations on history, memory and the legacies of atrocity add up to a remarkable conversion between the past and the present, and between silence and articulation. FINTAN O'TOOLE

A rich and complex book, partly a hymn in praise of the writers family and the locale in West Cork from which they and she sprang, partly a memoir of the writer's own life, and partly a meditation on violence and hurt in West Cork during the Irish War of Independence and the civil War that followed. CARLO GÉBLER