Strangely positioned between Europe and the post-colonial world, Ireland occupies a fluid and contradictory space, not least in the memory or imagination of its many emigrants. In this exploration of the culture of others, Rebecca Solnit returns to Ireland, armed with a newly-acquired passport - courtesy of otherwise forgotten maternal ancestors. Her journey is not to find a stable identity in ancestral roots, but to confront notions of stability, identity, ethnicity and nationalism in one of their great mythic sources.