Why a Booktrail?
2000s: A beautifully written story – the characters and the settings really come to life.
His Father’s Son
What you need to know before your trail
Australia is the Lucky Country, and Joey Driscol knows it.
He’s from Ireland but he’s convinced that this is the place he and his wife can make a new life and forget the troubles of the past.
It works for a time – they build a life and even have a son but the demons of the past have followed them to Australia.
Soon Joey discovers that his wife and child are missing. Have they returned to Ireland for some reason and will he have to do the same? And will Joey end up having to face the ghosts of his own past he thought he had escaped?
Locations
Reset- Ireland (Republic of)
- A: Galway - Clifden - The Sky Road
- Australia
- B: The other side of the world
Travel Guide
The overall message is about the things that can haunt us and how we deal with our pasts. The sections about 1970s Ireland are particularly atmospheric. Tony’s descriptive writing captures the language of Ireland very well indeed as it does the culture.
The opening chapters are particularly heartwarming as we see Marti talking to his dad and asking him why certain things are just so in Australia – for example why they call his dad who has red hair ‘Blue’ and not ‘red’
“Because Marti. It’s Australia and they do things differently here. It’s the other side of the world.”
We learn that mostly everyone in Australia comes from Ireland, Scotland or ‘the other place’ which is England, everything is the opposite (they have summer when England has winter) and that the water goes down the plug hole ‘the wrong way’. Now this is exactly the kind of small, seemingly insignificant detail that people who live in two countries recognise and remember the most. A nice touch to include such evocative images.
On a more serious note, the novel is semi-autobiographical as it mirrors Tony Black’s own childhood, himself having been born in Australia to Scottish parents who moved to Ireland when he was just a child. You can tell the raw honesty in this book that this is spoken from experience.
Where Next?
