Ireland’s Master Storyteller – The Collected Stories of Éamon Kelly –

“In 1975, actor and seanchai (traditional storyteller) Éamon Kelly joined forces with Abbey director Michael Colgan to stage a one-man storytelling show, In My Father’s Time, at the Peacock Theatre in Dublin. Its success exceeded all expectations and every June for seven years a new storytelling show by Éamon Kelly opened at the same theatre.

Kelly, who is as fine a writer as he is a seanchai, subsequently published six bestselling volumes of stories based on his shows …

In this book, Éamon Kelly’s stories are collected for the first time; stories of the real Kerry and the Magical past, the heartbreak of emigration, the stations, the priests, the courting and dancing, the war between the sexes. Here is an encapsulation of an era that has passed only very recently. Kelly mines a rich seam of humour and sadness out of resilience of a people rich in hospitality and generosity, imagination, culture and tradition.”