The Ghost Upon Your Path - Hardcover

John McCarthy's A Ghost Upon Your Path is a warm and intriguing book. While McCarthy was a prisoner in Lebanon, his mother died of cancer. He had always thought of himself as English, but after his father died, he decided to investigate his Irish roots by moving to Ireland. The result is this blend of personal discovery and travel book. McCarthy discovers that modern Ireland is far from the romanticised world so often portrayed. At the same time he receives a warm welcome from the distant cousins he discovers in his ancestral land. In doing so, he finds a country that is his own at a deeper level than he first imagined.

A Ghost Upon Your Path is written in a crisp, evocative journalistic style, and is crammed full of interesting facts about Ireland and peopled with the interesting characters McCarthy meets in his pilgrimage home. One wonders whether this book would have been published if McCarthy was not already a celebrity? Family history is not really interesting to non-family members. But McCarthy has the sense to personalise the search into his roots by telling us of his ambiguous feelings for his mother. Underlying the story is the sense that there are more ghosts in McCarthy's life than he is telling. Most intriguing is the sense that he (as the cover photo suggests) will never really recover from his Beirut ordeal, and that as a result, his trek to Ireland was simply another journey of a solitary man, restless in the pursuit to discover his true home. --Dwight Longenecker

An exploration of Ireland, the phenomenon of Irishness and the Ireland of the mind by the journalist and celebrity hostage (famous for his terrible incarceration with Brian Keenan). What is it about Ireland that draws people there? McCarthy promises rather more than standard travelogue and cultural history. He aims to get to the heart of Ireland, and to the Ireland of his heart, taking the reader through language, literature, music and religion, as well as through an account of his own particular relationship with Ireland. Previous books jointly written with Jill Morrell and Brian Keenan were conspicuous bestsellers. He is a very high-profile author and his past success will be repeated with this new book, despite (or possibly because of) its slightly unexpected subject matter.