Other Side Book

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.

Gordon's strength and skill as a storyteller have never been more evident than in this extraordinary novel of passage and change, of immigration and displacement, and of the struggles os families to find a common ground among generations.