A quarter-century after Frank McCourt’s extraordinary bestseller, Angela’s Ashes, Fintan O’Toole, one of the Anglophone world’s most consummate stylists, continues the narrative of Ireland into our own time. O’Toole was born in the year the revolution began. It was 1958, and the Irish government—in despair, because all the young people were leaving—opened the country to foreign investment and popular culture. So began a decades-long, ongoing experiment with Irish national identity. Weaving his own experiences into Irish social, cultural, and economic change, O’Toole shows how Ireland, in just one lifetime, has gone from a reactionary “backwater” to an almost totally open society. A sympathetic yet exacting observer, O’Toole delves into the violence of the Troubles and depicts, in biting detail, the astonishing collapse of the once-supreme Irish Catholic Church. The result is a stunning work of memoir and national history that reveals how the two modes are entwined for all of us.