"Nessa O'Mahony's writing is subtle and precise and this fine book crackles with truthfulness. But even more importantly, this is a work of great beauty, a story of how past and present flow into one another all the time.It's a moving, powerful and richly pleasurable read, audaciously imagined and achieved."(Joseph O'Connor)"This is the best verse-novel I've read in years, a many-stranded docu-fiction inspired by a real archive of unpublished correspondence recording the Australian adventures of the emigrant Butlers of Kilkenny. Personal letters, with their brisk, vivid authenticity, contrast with brilliantly convincing poems created by O'Mahony in the personae of the long-suffering protagonist, Margaret, and her smart young serving-girl, Lizzie. But this is only part of the story. The nineteenth-century tale is made to resonate within a strong, contemporary, framing narrative centered on Fiona Sheehan, an engaging, feisty, Dublin woman-writer who discovers the archive, love, and North Wales on her own journey of emigration and return. In Sight of Home is a truly original work which sets new standards and breaks new ground in the verse-novel, while at the same time inviting us into an effortlessly entertaining and ultimately profoundly moving `good read.'" (Carol Rumens)Nessa O'Mahony was born and lives in Dublin. Her poetry has appeared in a number of Irish, UK, and North American periodicals, has been translated into several European languages. She won the National Women's Poetry Competition in 1997 and was subsequently shortlisted for the Patrick Kavanagh Prize and Hennessy Literature Awards. Her second poetry collection, Trapping a Ghost, was published by bluechrome publishing in 2005 and her third, The Side Road to Star, is forthcoming from bluechrome in 2009. She was awarded an Irish Arts Council literature bursary in 2004 and an Artist's Bursary from South Dublin County Council in 2007. She is currently Artist in Residence at the John Hume Institute for Global Irish Studies, University College, Dublin. She is Assistant Editor of UK literary journal Orbis.