This book is an overlooked masterpiece by one of Ireland's best-loved writers. In it Synge captured the idiosyncracies of everyday speech better, perhaps, than any other Irish writer, while his eye caught the details of a way of life that has long since disappeared. First published in 1910, it is now available as a paperback for the first time, complete with the evocative illustrations by Jack B. Yeats - universally regarded as twentieth-century Ireland's greatest painter.