The children’s stories in this book are packed with humanity, tenderness, and wisdom. The authors present children and adults who confront wrongs, challenge superstition and injustice, and who often see further than others around them. The heroines and heroes in these stories are always filled with a sense of the common good, highlighting the qualities necessary to make society a fairer, better place, a home for a happy future, a Tír na nÓg, the Land of the Ever Young. Such a place can only materialise in the absence of wars, of profit-driven greed with its contempt for equality, humanity and the environment — a place where instead the common good is the measure of society.

Land of the Ever Young has been beautifully illustrated by the artist Karen Dietrich. Her images comment on and expand the humanist themes contained in the texts and help make them truly memorable for all readers, children and adults alike.

Land of the Ever Young: An Anthology of Working People’s Writing for Children from Contemporary Ireland, edited by Jenny Farrell with illustrations by Karen Dietrich, ISBN 978-1-912710-43-0.