Mark Clinton was murdered by a group of agrarian 'bandits' who resented his family's possession of some disputed acres; his killer was tried and executed by the dead man's relatives and comrades in the Meath IRA. A mentally challenged youth was shot as an informer by another relative of Dungan's, and buried in secrecy and silence.

What unites these deaths is the violence that engulfed Ireland during the campaign against the British, but also the passions unleashed by arguments over the ownership of the soil. That often brutal struggle between landless laborers and smallholders and more prosperous farmers is a forgotten aspect of the war of independence.

Myles Dungan's book, focused on one family, offers an original perspective on this still controversial period: a prism through which the moral and personal costs of violence, and the elemental conflict over land, come alive in surprising ways.