At Swim, Two Boys

In the year before the 1916 Easter Rising, two working-class Dublin boys meet at the Forty Foot bathing place. Jim Mack, a shy scholarship student, and Doyler Doyle, the coalman's son turned young socialist, make a pact to swim to the distant Muglins rock and claim it on Easter morning. Over the seasons of training, their friendship deepens into first love, while the older aesthete MacMurrough watches over them and the country lurches toward armed rebellion. O'Neill spent ten years writing the book in dense, playful, Joyce-inflected prose, weaving private desire into the public convulsion that made modern Ireland.