Island Cross-talk : Pages from a Diary

Written between 1919 and 1925, 'Island Cross-Talk' was the first book to come out of the Blasket Islands - that tiny, remote community off the west coast of Kerry. Springing from a powerful oral tradition, it captured the moment of transition from speech to writing, and sowed the seeds of a rich and extraordinary flowering of literature that was to make the Blaskets famous throughout the world. In these vivid, unadorned sketches from his diary, Tomas O'Crohan writes from the immediacy of his experience: the beauty and the dangers of the island and the sea; the hardship, poverty, and hunger; but also the flashes of humour, the friendships, the intensity of life. In 1953 the Great Blasket was abandoned to the seagulls and the silence. Tomas O'Crohan composed his own epitaph, and that of his community, when he wrote 'the like of us will never be again'.