Irish author Phelan to visit Rockville Centre

The Island Now

In the tradition of Frank McCourt’s “Angela’s Ashes” and Alice Taylor’s “To School Through the Fields,” Tom Phelan’s “We Were Rich and We Didn’t Know It: A Memoir of My Irish Boyhood” is a heartfelt and masterfully written memoir of growing up in Ireland in the 1940s. 

Phelan, who was born and raised in County Laois in the Irish midlands, spent his formative years working with his wise and demanding father as he sought to wrest a livelihood from a farm that was often wet, muddy and back-breaking.

It was a time before rural electrification, the telephone and indoor plumbing; a time when the main modes of travel were bicycle and animal cart; a time when small farmers struggled to survive and turkey eggs were hatched in the kitchen cupboard; and a time when the Church exerted enormous control over Ireland.

“We Were Rich and We Didn’t Know It” recounts Phelan’s upbringing in an isolated, rural community from the day he was delivered by the local midwife. With tears and laughter, it speaks to the strength of the human spirit in the face of life’s adversities. 

Phelan had just turned 50 when his first novel, “In the Season of the Daisies,” was accepted for publication. That novel was later chosen by Barnes and Noble for its Discover Great New Writers series.

Since then, Phelan has written five other novels: “Iscariot,” “Derrycloney,” “The Canal Bridge,” “Nailer” and “Lies the Mushroom Pickers Told.” He now lives in New York.

Phelan will be launching his new book at Turn of the Corkscrew Books and Wine, with an appearance scheduled for Wednesday, March 6 at 7 p.m. Maureen Murphy, Irish studies historian and features editor of The Irish Literary Supplement since 1982, will interview Phelan at the special event that is not to miss.

Turn of the Corkscrew Books and Wine is located at 110 N. Park Ave. in Rockville Centre.

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