Mary M. Trant

A captivating insight at a vanishing world

Childhood memoirs rarely come any more enchanting than this. In sharing her experiences growing up in rural Ireland in the 1950s, Mary M. Trant brings to life a world we have lost. She doesn’t hide the fact that times could be hard, but the joy that a simple slice of home-made soda bread, lashings of home-made butter and a generous dollop of golden syrup can bring must surely trump any fast-food or ready meal that we could buy today!

Maggie and her brother Ted - just a year apart in age but joined forever by love and caring - rampage around their little world, sliding down forbidden water pipes, rounding up the family menagerie composed of any farm animal you could imagine from hens to horses and Mary brings their sheer joy of living exultantly to the page.

Mary’s world is unique and it is filled with a riot of characters, from family to the villagers - Mrs O’Brien, over from America to find some peace in her last years; Danjoe and his wife, whose already-brimming home always has room for just one more; Josh the postman, with his exciting parcels from Aunt Maureen in San Francisco, that magical land to the far west that Maggie and Ted look for with their hands made into binoculars as the sun sets. There is death and birth but mostly glorious happiness in this creative nonfiction memoir that truly deserves the word ’uplifting’.

Life Between the Mountains and the Sea is composed in a series of vignettes which come together seamlessly to paint a picture of a happy land to the west which we would all do well to look towards - with our hands made into binoculars, of course!