"So, Tom that went and Tom that would come back!" is how Nora Lynch greeted the young American Lynch in 1970, at the edge of the ocean in West Clare, outside the cottage that his great-grandfather—another Thomas Lynch—had left nearly a century before on a one-way ticket to America.

In thirty-five years and dozens of return trips to Ireland, Lynch has found a template for the larger world inside the small one, the planet in the local parish. The neighbors and characters he found there—spinsters and farmers, local heroes, poets, clergy, and corner boys—taught him to look, as Montaigne said we ought, for "the whole of Man's estate" in every man.

Part memoir, part cultural study, Booking Passage is a sparkling, often comedic guidebook for those Lynch calls "fellow travelers, fellow pilgrims" making their way through the complexities of their own lives and times.