The setting is rural Ireland in the 1950s. Thomas Rice has written a riveting memoir about a way of life that no longer exists: no running water, no toilets, no electricity and little access to education, jobs or basic health care. Early on we are drawn into a culture with a recent memory of famines, a culture still showing the scars from the homestead ruins that pockmark the landscape to the ghost towns and villages that never recovered from The Great Hunger of the 1840s.