“With Booking Passage: We Irish and Americans, Tom Lynch proves yet again why he is one of the most important writers in the English language. Whether writing of the wonders of indoor plumbing added to his ancestral home in County Clare, or of a solemn funeral procession in the American desert southwest, or of a young man’s quest for a job in Dublin, Mr. Lynch reveals time and again, in a voice riven with joy and sorrow and, above all, wisdom, what it means not just to be American or Irish, but human. I wish Tom Lynch wrote more books, because no matter what he writes-whether essays or poems-I am made better for it.”