Ireland Unhinged is a searching, multi-layered and often hilarious portrait of one of the most enigmatic countries on earth. Within its pages you will meet remarkable people in extraordinary places -- a Cork artist who paints in the dark; a bacchanal in a Protestant cathedral, a white witch in Donegal; J.P. Donleavy, the author of the world famous Ginger Man; wistful rural farmers; monks in a Belfast monastery; and a Major Tut Tut who turns into a human stalagmite. The reader will discover Ireland as it has not quite been presented before -- with clichés pushed aside for a loving and jaundiced eye for its very present.
The Ireland in this book is not the same country profiled in previous works of travel literature, nor in any guide book. Ireland Unhinged, told with an insider's knowledge, is about the peak years of one of the most incredible boom economies in the West, and then its collapse. Just yesterday, the populace was so rollicking it its new wealth that the Irish were buying Mercedes Benzes faster than any other people on earth. Now the bubble has burst, gloom and doom seem to be apocalyptic -- then again, little in Ireland is ever what it seems.
Who blew the dream? What endures? Ireland Unhinged takes the reader into hidden recesses of the country's culture and landscape to answer those questions in picaresque style. Visionary entrepreneurs and crack ups surface in the giddy days of the Celtic Tiger. The author carves out a second life in bucolic riverside village that somehow turns its back on the hubbub. And here is neighbour who doesn't give a damn, digging for 15,000 year old skeletons in his bog.
No contemporary book offers the reader such a tour of this wildly changing, yet stubbornly defiant and mercurial land.
Reviews
"In a fascinating blend of travel, humor and journalistic insight, Monagan goes in search of the the soul of the Celtic Tiger, in the aftermath of a period of unprecedented economic growth followed by a precipitous bust."
Kanbar & Conrad : Review
