In Booking Passage, Thomas Lynch talks about his Irish-American family and his connections to the village they came from in western Ireland. As a 21-year-old he goes to Ireland and meets his distant relatives, an old bachelor and his spinster sister, who still live in the house his great-great-grandfather was given as a wedding present. He becomes close to them and visits them regularly until their death when he inherits the house. I lived in Dublin for 2 years in the early '80's and this book brought back memories of the rural Ireland I visited while I was there. Here's a passage I particularly enjoyed. It talks about the Irish response to a run of warm, sunny weather:

"For the first few days there is the usual greeting, punctuated with authentic glee. 'Grand day thank God, entirely!' But after several days in the one week of such relief, the locals take a different view, knowing as sure as heaven there's hell to pay and that too much good requires much more bad to balance it.

'Grand day,' they say with the wary look of the long-suffering, waiting out old peril and new doom, 'Grand day, indeed, the Lord've mercy on us all." ( )