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(price-clipped) [good sound copy, modest wear to extremities; the jacket is edgeworn, with some chipping to and surrounding the top of the spine, tiny tears and minor paper loss at several corners, and some nasty red staining to the lower section of the rear panel]. A sprawling romantic tale backgrounded against the Irish Civil War, narrated by its protagonist, one Dennis Fitzhugh O'Shea -- aka Baron Dunfogar, a member of "the somewhat emasculated peerage of Ireland" -- who returns home after serving in the British Army during the Great War to find that his ancestral home has become a base of operations for the Sinn Fein. Before long (being a good-hearted chap with a sense of basic fairness), he is won over to the side of the rebels, his conversation conveniently helped along by his attraction to a proud and beautiful young lass (who also happens to be a gun-runner for the rebels). The book is steeped in the country's tradition and lore -- each chapter is prefaced by a bit of Irish verse or lyric -- and is partisan all the way; as one contemporary review noted, it's "as pro-Eire as an IRA bombing, as anti-British as a Hitler speech" -- which may not have gone down well in all quarters at the time, given that pro-British sentiment was on the upswing in the period immediately prior to America's entry into World War II. The author (1900-1973) was a first-generation Irish-American, his father having emigrated from County Cork; he was educated at Harvard, then spent some time as an investment banker before turning to writing. He apparently never wrote another novel, although it was reported in 1941 that he had written a play, "The Undersea Visitor," about a German submarine surfacing off the coast of Ireland; Guthrie McClintic was supposedly interested in producing it, but it seems to have never made it to the boards. In the early years of the war, Welch was also involved with the Federal Union movement; as its acting director, he pushed a kind of proto-United Nations idea of the world's democracies forming a world organization for the dual purpose of winning the war and building the ensuing peace. (He is not, by the way, to be confused with the contemporary fantasy/adventure novelist of the same name.) A somewhat uncommon book, it seems. ****NOTE that additional postage charges will be assessed for international shipping of this moderately heavy book; if this concerns you, please contact us for a shipping quote before placing your order. As always at ReadInk, domestic Media Mail shipping is free.****.…