Beyond the West Coast of Ireland, lies the Great Blasket Island. Beautiful desolate and surrounded by wild seas, it was once home to a small but fiercely independent community of people whose medieval way of life had long vanished from the Irish mainland. They spoke a lost, pure form of Gaelic and told tales from ancient times by the light of their turf fires; writers and romantics were drawn there, spellbound. But it could not last--by November 1953 the island had been abandoned forever. Following the fate of one family, the Kearneys, Cole Morton's moving account of the disintegration of their community and their search for new lives in the near-mythical paradise of America is an extraordinary story.