Groundwork — Robert Welch

Focusing on the province of Munster, in southern Ireland, and panning back and forth over some four hundred years, from 1586 to 1956, Welch chronicles the family histories of the Condons, Herberts, Holmes, and the O'Dwyers. He focuses in on periods of great national disruption-the Elizabethean conquest, the Famine, emigration, the struggle for Irish independence. And he lets his characters speak in their own words, to tell us how they and their families fared through these events. It is their voices that make up Welch's story-individual, intimate, shockingly immediate-and the voices of their English masters. ""This powerful novel from Ireland is literature of the first rank, revealing a fiction born of the clash between history and legend.""-Booklist. ""Welch has succeeded brilliantly.""-New York Times Book Review