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Two other authors, [[:Category:Miss Read|Miss Read]] and [[:Category:Rebecca Shaw|Rebecca Shaw]], have already purloined the village for their own. I so wish that the publishers had chosen a more distinctive title for this reprint. It's the Irishness of the memoir that will attract English readers.
If you know Ireland, you will already know that it produces readers, writers and philosophers in abundance. Alice Taylor is one. She has achieved so much in her life. As well as bringing up five children – quite enough effort for most people – she worked in the family village store and developed it into a supermarket, built and established a nearby guest house and cared for two elderly relatives in their last illnesses. As a sideline she wrote novels, poetry and memoirs, including the best-selling [[To School Through the The Fields by Alice Taylor|To School through the Fields]] about her childhood and ''Quench the Lamp'' about her adolescent years in the 1950's. ''The Village'', the third volume, deals with a period of thirty years from the time she married into the village shopkeeper's family and came to live in Innishannon.
This book has been loved by Irish readers since its first publication in 1992. Nostalgia is a popular genre, probably because reminiscences tap into the reader's own hoard of memories. Alice Taylor's writing evokes an Ireland before the EEC and the roar of the Celtic Tiger. I imagine many expatriates on this side of the Irish Sea will enjoy these tales of once-familiar village life untroubled by the swinging Sixties in far-off London.
