Moments Of Glad Grace

'This is a wise, funny, and tender book, beautifully written and perfectly executed from first to last sentence. It's about a daughter and her ageing father, it's about genealogy and identity, it's about Ireland, but actually it's about how we love the ones we love.

Moments of Glad Grace is a travelogue of the heart.
It's a road you'll want to travel.'

How many loved your moments of glad grace, And loved your beauty with love false or true, But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, And loved the sorrows of your changing face; And bending down beside the glowing bars, Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled And paced upon the mountains overhead And hid his face amid a crowd of stars. Moments of Glad Grace is a travelogue of the heart. It's a road you'll want to travel.' Yann Martel, author of Life of Pi. FROM THE BOOK JACKET: Moments of Glad Grace is a moving and witty memoir of aging, familial love, and the hunt for roots and belonging. The story begins as a trip from Canada to Ireland in search of genealogical data. How many loved your moments of glad grace, And loved your beauty with love false or true, But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, And loved the sorrows of your changing face; And bending down beside the glowing bars, Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled. And paced upon the mountains overhead.

FROM THE BOOK JACKET:

Moments of Glad Grace is a moving and witty memoir of aging, familial love, and the hunt for roots and belonging. The story begins as a trip from Canada to Ireland in search of genealogical data and documents. Being eighty and in the early stages of Parkinson’s Disease, Joe invites his daughter Alison to come along as his research assistant, which might have worked very well had she any interest ― any at all ― in genealogy.

Very quickly, the father-daughter pilgrimage becomes more comical than fruitful, more of a bittersweet adventure than a studious mission. And rather than rigorous genealogy, their explorations move into the realm of family and forgiveness, the primal search for identity and belonging, and questions about responsibility to our ancestors and the extent to which we are shaped by the people who came before us.

Though continually bursting with humor, Moments of Glad Grace is ultimately a song of appreciation for the precious and limited time we have with our parents, the small moments we share, and the gifts of transcendence we might find there.

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PLEASE NOTE: ECW Press offers a free e-book version AND a discount on the audiobook with proof of purchase of the paper book. Details here.

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ANATOMY OF AN AUDIOBOOK

Alison narrated the audiobook versions of Moments of Glad Grace and Confessions of a Fairy’s Daughter, and recorded a few short behind-the-scenes videos of the process.