Top Highlights

• A few did still speak of the rain, stood at gates in a drizzle, looked into the sky, made predictions inexact and individual, as if they were still versed in bird, berry or water language, and for the most part people indulged them, listened as if to a story, nodded, said Is that so? and went away believing not a word, but to pass the story like a ...
• A hundred books could not capture a single village. That’s not a denigration, that’s a testament.
• Faha doesn’t care. It long since accepted that by dint of personality and geography its destiny was to be a place passed over, and gently, wholly forgotten.
• You shopped by blood and tribe. If you were related, however thinly, to Clohessy, or Bourke, who both sold the same tea, flour and sugar, the same three vegetables and tins of imperishable foodstuffs, that’s where you did your business.
• People in Faha hadn’t got the hang of parking yet. That Holy Week it was still five years before the introduction of the driving test, and another three before anyone in Faha would attempt to pass it. There were only ten cars in the parish. The drivers didn’t mind if they just landed in the general vicinity of where they were headed,