A Year’s Turning — Michael Viney

Condition : Good.
Penguin, 1998, Medium-format Paperback – Memoir – 232pp. ISBN 9780140277494.

This memorable journal of one year in a remote cottage on the west Irish coast is destined to become a classic of Irish nature writing. For nearly twenty years, Michael Viney’s popular column in the Irish Times, “Another Life, ” has captured the beauties and mysteries of the natural world in Ireland. This lyrical month-by-month journal affirms his reputation as a uniquely gifted, compassionate, and informed commentator.

A Year’s Turning chronicles his family’s life of self-sufficiency in the country. Viney weaves personal memories and reflections as he observes the effects of one year’s passing on the land, animals, and landscape around him, to create a “mosaic of all the years, each month an essay in remembrance.”

He begins with January and the snow, gale-force winds, and rough seas. Come June, the house “breathes gently, all doors and windows open to whatever breeze there is…besieged by light.” Come December, it ends, or begins again, the year’s turning.
This is the culmination of two decades of living close to land and its creatures.

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