` Go to the Aran Islands. Live there as if you were one of the people themselves, express a life that has never found expression.` J.M. Synge did exactly as W.B. Yeats suggested &, revisiting these harsh yet beautiful specks of land off Ireland`s west coast over a period of five years, created a literary masterpiece. Synge immersed himself in the islanders` lives as they steered their curaghs through Atlantic waves, mourned their dead, celebrated weddings & suffered the horrors of eviction. The Aran Islands weaves their stories with Synge`s own & the result, as Colm Tóibín has observed, is that ` Unlike most travel books of 100 years ago, it has not dated at all.` This is the first paperback edition in which Jack B. Yeats`s unforgettable drawings, commissioned for the first Dublin edition, have appeared alongside Synge`s haunting prose. Samuel Beckett was a lifelong admirer of Yeats`s `extraordinary craftsmanship` before which, he believed, `one can simply bow, wonder-struck`.