The Largest Baby in Ireland After the Famine [Paperback]

Every Sunday the men met at the bridge. Felix Campbell was there with a couple dozen men. They were all shapes and sizes, ages and wits. What they shared was history, what they knew was their place. Farmers all, some creating the impression that they lived a more urgent and passionate existence in the fighting fields of France, than in the potato fields of reality. Felix was smoking and talking when the bridge-gatherers spotted a figure moving over the brae. The walker was a woman, most certainly, but who? Women's strict observance of the day of rest left little time for gallivanting. And where could a stranger be heading when there was nowhere she could go that the men wouldn't have known about? Then the woman appeared. She was all color and sway, and as far away as imaginable from the local women. Pale, pale skin and strong dark auburn hair falling free to large wide hips. She wore a purple shawl. That night Felix, a bachelor, aged 43, living in the house he was born in, dreamt of purple. Purple in the shape of a woman. I thoroughly enjoyed The Largest Baby in Ireland After the Famine. It's clear-eyed and immersive and, at times, truly lyrical... The Largest Baby in Ireland After the Famine combines romantic and historical fiction to great effect and it's good to see it given a reissue almost fifteen years after it was first written. This story shouldn't be out of print. The author has created something unusual in today???s climate: a celebration of ordinary life in rural Ireland before, during and after the Great War, which readers of Irish-based life in the early twentieth century should enjoy.