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Stories from a Small Town

by Peter McNiff

362 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); Illustrated; catalogue #04-1194; ISBN 1-4120-3367-5; US$27.50, C$32.31, EUR23.00, £16.00

Small town life in a little Irish port as seen through the eyes of twenty old-timers. Illustrated and contains a brief history of the town.

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about the book      about the author      excerpts      catalogue info

About the Book To be added.

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About the Author Peter McNiff is an award-winning writer of short fiction and television documentaries. Here he applies his skills to a monumental social documentary of life in a small irish village.

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Excerpts

Stories from a Small Town is about life in a little old seaport town on Ireland's east coast. A brief history of the town provides the background for these stories, recorded and edited over a six-year period. Twenty-five of the town's elders take part, among them a parlourmaid, judge, blacksmith, soldier, sailor, airman, fireman, doctor, merchant, boat-builder and a sea captain's wife.

'A small town is for its inhabitants the immutable centre of the universe,' writes author Peter McNiff, 'a place where thought and experience overrun all boundaries in space and time. Knock on any door and you'll find a version of the same anecdote the world over, beginning, middle and end. There is another ingredient, the raconteur's colourful use of the vernacular, which is retained here deliberately, to show the diverse use of English language in our time. Each human experience differs and memory plays its own tricks. Story-telling is comparable to a sporting event in which the rules remain unchanged. The twists and turns of the players enhance the performance and the result rarely matches expectations. Life, of course, is profoundly more complicated and contains as many deaths as defeats. The joys and woes of the living in this town are interwoven with the first sixty years of the Twentieth Century when Ireland struggled to stay on its feet after winning the battle for Independence. We are talking here of a town generated by a railway and developed as a holiday resort by local entrepreneurs for a Protestant elite, in the last years of Victoria's reign and the first of Edward Seventh's, when Britain's empire was in serious decline. To look backward in time is for most of us to look homeward and symptomatic of age and that phase when wisdom begins. Nor is it easy on the emotions, for it takes courage to face the past truthfully and with understanding, if not forgiveness and tell exactly how it was. Inevitably questions arise as to what might have been, and if only....'

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Catalogue Information

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