The Parish - Tapa dura

As C.S. Lewis once described the experience of reading Edmund Spenser, to read Alice is to grow in mental health --Hibernia

Her books chime with the Small is Beautiful movement, with the growing realisation that local community is very precious and must be nurtured and preserved. Taylor's latest book, The Parish, deals directly with this central idea. It's a benign account of the extraordinary things that the members of a close-knit community do for the good of their parish and ultimately for each other.... Through a series of vignettes of life in her own village, Innishannon, Taylor explores the positive values of the social community that makes up the parish. --Irish Independent

In a series of vignettes of life in her village, Alice Taylor reasserts the priorities of public space and local community. The Parish evokes and explores the positive values of community, which could be renewed and reinvigorated for a present and future that achieves harmony between comfort and the pressing need to respect the environment.