Amazon.com description: Product Description: This sweeping story of land, conflict, and family traditions is a wonderful sequel to Alice Taylor's long-awaited fiction debut, The Woman of the House.Alice Taylor's memoirs of life in mid-century Ireland made her one of Ireland's best-selling, and best-loved, writers. According to the Los Angeles Times, "Taylor's telling makes the world of her village universal, and sets her firmly in that mysteriously potent Irish storytelling tradition." In Across the River, Taylor continues to survey the Irish family with keen insight and gentle humor.The Phelan and Conway farms stand in hostile confrontation across the river. The long dispute between the two families simmers, then explodes. Meanwhile, Martha Phelan is locked in stubborn conflict with her son Peter. He wants to make changes in the way the farm is run, but she secretly plans quite different changes; the tension between them builds but is suddenly overtaken by the force of a greater problem. In her second novel Alice Taylor continues the story begun in The Woman of the House, once again capturing the pulse and sinews of Irish rural life like no other author has done.AUTHORBIO: Alice Taylor's first memoir, To School Through the Fields, was an overnight sensation, becoming the fastest-selling book in Ireland's history and spawning a series of further volumes that includes Quench the Lamp, The Village, Country Days, and An Irish Country Christmas, as well as a novel, The Woman of the House. She continues to make her home in Innishannon, County Cork, where her family tends to the local post office and market.