Sean Walsh

Penny For Your Travels

PENNY FOR YOUR TRAVELS.  (Reviews.)

Memories which evoked my own childhood and probably that of most men, be they from Louth or Lesotho. The author makes very good use of setting. Father, son and dog out for a winter walk “the countryside still frosted, crunching underfoot”.

Constant chatter from the son tells us a lot about the father-son relationship. He also gets inside the mind and the priorities of a young boy and that is no mean feat. Bravo.

We begin to realise that these are memories of a man looking back on a happy childhood and his pubescent journey through teenage years where the story ends, perhaps prematurely, in the inevitable sundering between all fathers and sons.

A well told story. Nice turn of phrase – “the pier …a finger-and-thumb extension of the Cooley mountains, reaching into the Irish Sea…” and plenty more.

We are left with smiles, tears, nostalgia and the painful knowledge that sons, of whatever age, will never see the world through the eyes of the fathers.

– Kevin Healy. (deceased.) Former chair of the Corpus Christi parish pastoral council.

This book gives a wonderful insight into one man’s life journey with all its light and shade. The literary form of the text invites the reader into the mind and experience of the author. The author manages to create a series of vivid scenes without describing them too explicitly.

This reserve in presentation means that the reader has to engage with the text actively, using his or her imagination rather than simply passively absorbing the text. The effort which the text asks of the reader is very worthwhile. The end result is that the reader has a sense of having really entered into the experiences that the author mediates through his writing. These are personal experiences but they will find an echo in every reader’s life experience because the author is dealing with deep movements of the human heart. I would warmly recommend this book to all. It is worth a slow, meditative and repeated read.

– Martin Hogan, Mater Dei Institute, Dublin 9.