Strangely positioned between Europe and the postcolonial world, Ireland occupies a fluid and contradictory space, not least in the memory or imagination of its many emigrants. In this sensitive exploration of the culture of others, Rebecca Solnit returns to Ireland, armed with a newly acquired Irish passport – courtesy of otherwise forgotten maternal ancestors. Her journey is not to find a stable identity in ancestral roots but to confront notions of stability, identity, ethnicity and nationalism in one of their great mythic sources.

A Book of Migrations is a postcolonial revision of conventional travel literature. In her passage through Ireland, Rebecca Solnit portrays in microcosm a history made of great human tides of invasion, colonization, emigration, nomadism and tourism. Travel itself produces its own versions of memory and identity, and travel's transformation into the information age's pre-eminent industry – tourism – comes under close scrutiny. It is no accident that her journey culminates in an encounter with the Travellers, the indigenous nomads of contemporary Ireland.

Enriched by cross-cultural comparisons with the history of the American West, A Book of Migrations carves a new route through Ireland's history, literature and landscape. Rich with historical reflections – including fine essays on Roger Casement and Jonathan Swift, the Dublin Natural History Museum and the disappearance of Ireland's forests – the book combines the virtues of the finest travel writing with a critical acuity.

“This sensual and intellectually stimulating foray portrays an Ireland that the casual tourist might miss.” – Publishers Weekly

“At last a travel book that articulates the complexity of every place in the present era, when the nation-state is collapsing in front of our very eyes and the fictions of borders no longer limit the movements of populations, or the penetrations of cultures, or the scope of our dreams.” – Guillermo Gómez-Peña

Rebecca Solnit is author of Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Secret Exhibition: Six California Artists of the Cold War Era, Savage Dreams: A Journey into the Hidden Wars of the American West, River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West and Wanderlust: A History of Walking. Her Hollow City: The Siege of San Francisco and the Crisis of American Urbanism, created with photographer Susan Schwartzenberg, is also available from Verso.

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1 85984 186 4
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