Out in the bogs of County Mayo, there is a patch of land that grows the finest spuds in the world. Here the giant crisp manufacturers, ChipCo, have set up a factory to exploit this natural wonder, to the great enrichment of all the local inhabitants, except some of the more stubborn old guard, who mutter darkly that no good will come of it.

Heiney evokes a modern Ireland very far from the whimsical, charming, cliché, and there is some stinging satire. An unlikely local taxi driver calling himself Danny Morrissey, is later exposed as one Raymond Polk out of Louisville, Kentucky: a neat mockery of the Irish- ancestry pretensions of far too many Americans in love with a romantic Ireland that never existed. And as the ChipCo plot thickens, Heiney draws out some daring parallels between the Ireland of the 1840s and today, exploited by the English executives of ChipCo, who think they know that Ireland is still "at heart a peasant country; pigs in the back yards, empty beer bottles in pockets, and those not brought to their knees by booze crouched in endless prayer, slavishly muttering Catholic devotions." Coming from a "celebrity author" (Heiney used to work on That's Life), one expects something entertaining but lightweight. Far from it. There is a dark thread to this novel, running back to the worst horrors of the Potato Famine, that gives the narrative real drive.--Christopher Hart