Born of Irish-German parentage, author Hugo Hamilton is committed to exploring the intricacies of his bipartite heritage and has noted, in an interview with Liam Fay published 30 August 1998 in The Sunday Times (London), that, coincidentally, he was born in 1953, the same year the last of the Blasket Islanders--recognized in Ireland for their adherence to traditional culture--abandoned their homes to live on the mainland. Hamilton likens himself to a "modern-day Peig Sayers," a Blasket Island diarist who left a record of her life on the island and thus helped to preserve her culture. Accordingly, Hamilton is known for saturating his characters in a complex cultural and political milieu and documenting precisely their relationships with one another given the strictures of their environment.

Often praised for his taut, economical prose style, Hamilton tries to strip away his authorial presence while still insisting on the political dimension of his work; as...