WE WERE RICH AND WE DIDN'T KNOW IT

In the tradition of Jennifer Worth's Call the Midwife and Roddy Doyle's Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, WE WERE RICH AND WE DIDN'T KNOW IT is a charming and wonderfully written memoir of growing up in Ireland in the 1940s.

Tom Phelan was born and raised in the Irish midlands, where he spent the first fourteen years of his life working for his father, John-Joe. The experience left indelible marks on Tom, the first being an urgency to escape from his father's wet, muddy, back-breaking farm.

WE WERE RICH AND WE DIDN'T KNOW IT recounts Tom's upbringing from the day he was born to the day he left home to take the long path toward the Roman Catholic priesthood.

More than that, it offers readers a glimpse of life in 1940s Ireland, where electricity is not yet universal; where Nurse Byrne wobbles around deep potholes in mucky country lanes on her way to deliver babies; where Father Flood, in what seems to be against the nature of the man, founds a boxing club for the local boys to beat each other senseless; and where Tom Phelan grew up in awe of the priests who lived in warm houses and always looked so clean.


Tom Phelan had just turned fifty when his first novel, In the Season of the Daisies, was accepted for publication by the Lilliput Press in Dublin. Since then, he has penned five other novels: Nailer, The Canal Bridge, Iscariot, Derrycloney, and Lies the Mushroom Pickers Told. He has also written for Newsday, the Irish Echo, and the Recorder, the journal of the American Irish Historical Society. Born and raised on a farm in Strahard, Mountmellick, County Laois, in the Irish midlands, Phelan now makes his home in New York.