The Other Side

Both Ellen and Vincent left Ireland in the early part of this century, one bitterly escaping shame, humiliation, and fear; the other filled with hope for the promise and future of America – the “other side.” Together for more than sixty years, they raised a family, savored their dreams, comforted, challenged, and defied one another. Their desires and fears are manifest in the generations that follow – children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, each carrying as a legacy of the past the need to find a true place in the family and in the world at large. As she writes of passage and change, of the struggle of generations to find a common ground, Mary Gordon reveals that the dramas wrought by social and cultural forces can be resolved only in the realm of the heart.