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Choice Publishing Book Store |
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A Stoney Road
By
Patrick J. Coyle
ISBN: 978-1-909154-25-4
Price: €12.50
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An autobiography that will echo in a million hearts as you laugh and cry with Patrick Coyle on his tragicomic childhood journey through 30s and 40s rural Ireland. Follow him as a young teenage emigrant to the heart of industrial England and the colourful chequered career that follows. The narrative is always lively and entertaining made up as it is of 50 individual stories each one complete in itself. So the reader is engaged on every page. Each storyline is further enhanced with a sprinkling of poetic gems. Told with humour and insight this is a moving human story you'll enjoy....
5-star review:
In the 1940’s, to be a child in Ireland was to grow up in a land of zero tolerance poverty, large families, unquestionable clergy, mass emigration, zero immigration, scant education, record low marriage rates, Magdalene sisters, Irish sons sleeping rough on the streets of London, and probably the most damning fact of all – a country that led the world in locking up its people in psychiatric hospitals, often for social reasons. Even Stalinist Russia couldn’t compete with us. If you want to understand such a country, read this book. It delivers an honest, heartfelt, insightful account of growing up barefoot in the stony grey soil of rural Monaghan, through to working in the Industrial centres of England, and to a final return to Ireland, family in tow. It tells you what it means to be Irish and why it is so.
5-star review:
I loved this book!! It made me laugh and cry - at the same time. It is a book of our time, of the cycles of economic prosperity and hardship. A personal tale of a life well spent, full of humour even in the bad times. As well as a personal autobiography, it is an historic piece describing what life was like for a boy and man and his family in Ireland and England in the 30s right up to the 80s, Perhaps the author would consider doing a second book, to see what happens next??
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