Tomás Bairéad is regarded as one of the finest short–story writers in Irish of the twentieth-century. His memoir recounts his youth on a small farm in an isolated region of the west of Ireland, one of the last “Gaeltachtaí” or Irish-speaking districts. An active member of the Irish Volunteers in his area and a talented writer of both Irish and English, Bairéad was part of the first-generation of Irish people who made their living as journalists in the newly-independent Irish Republic. His memories of working as a newspaper-man in the Irish capital, Dublin, make for fascinating reading, as do the coterie of Nationalist activists and intellectuals with whom he associated, including renowned writers such as Liam O’Flaherty, Máirtín Ó Cadhain and Pádraic Ó Conaire, to name but a few.