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by Victoria Tester (Author)
This haunting dreamscape of the Great Famine evokes the world of the vanishing tenant farmer population of Ireland through the eyes of its nine-year-old narrator, Una Mac Cormaic -- a visionary child who echoes the Hunger Spirit of Irish folklore. Una spies on the lives of those around her in an effort to hold onto their disappearing world. Nights, she trails the men of her village, who, hired to build a Road to Nowhere, dress as women and take vengeance on public officials. She witnesses the private agony of the priest who bullies the villagers into choosing Catholic martyrdom over the soup of the ministering Quakers, and the local rising middle class farmer's schemes for his own gain. Interwoven is Una's mysterious relationship to a pioneering English Photographer who travels to Ireland to gain English support for the Irish cause, and to the magical machine -- the newly invented camera - the Photographer uses to record images of suffering on his travels throughout Ireland. A spirited innocence and humor run like a rich vein of life-giving green throughout this tragic parable of the Irish Famine.
Author Biography
Victoria Tester is a poet and dramatist whose first book Miracles of Sainted Earth (University of New Mexico Press 2002) won the Willa Cather Literary Award in Poetry, whose novella Hunger Road is also available as a stage play, and whose New Mexico Ghost Play Cycle, a chronology of fifteen plays of thirty women of southern New Mexico, includes stories of Irish, Scots, Welsh and Cornish miners and immigrants. Tester holds an M.A. in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Houston's esteemed Creative Writing Program. She has taught literature and creative writing, and she works to address the humanitarian hunger crisis on the Mexico border.
