They were learning words by having someone (the Wordsmith or his apprentice) write down words on cards. Also, in the book it was said that the time period was further in the future so I was also perplexed at the use of technology. One other thing I was horrified by was seeing how all Ark citizens were so obliviously following Noa. But, I did enjoy (and was a bit terrified) seeing how people were forced to converse using 500 words or less and would be banished if they didn't speak List. I figured out later that it was dystopian. Also being truthful, given my lack of experience reading dystopian novels, I was a bit confused, at first, as to whether Ark was utopian or dystopian. In the first 100 pages or so, I didn't really get the plot or what the climax would be. However, being truthful, it took me a while to really get into the flow of reading this, but once I was, it was full steam ahead. Once I picked the book up (because of the cover) it sounded too interesting to put it back down, after reading the synopsis. Pamela, who has come to Ireland in search of a memory and a man who may not have existed in the first place.What personally made me pick up this book was, in fact, the cover. Casey, a card-carrying member of the Irish Republican Army, who must face the fact that five years away has left him a stranger, a misfit in his own neighborhood where not everyone is sympathetic to a convicted rebel. They come from disparate backgrounds - Jamie a wealthy aristocrat whose life is like an imperfect but multi-faceted jewel-brilliant, flawed and with a glitter that is designed to distract the observer. All three lives are on a collision course with each other against the backdrop of the burgeoning civil rights movement and a nation on the brink of revolution.

It is the spring of 1968 in Belfast and James Kirkpatrick has just lost his father under suspicious circumstances, Casey Riordan is released from prison after five years and Pamela O'Flaherty has crossed an ocean and a lifetime of memories to find the man she fell in love with as a little girl.

In this sweeping and powerful epic the journey begins in the 'terrible beauty' of Northern Ireland during a time when conflict reigns and no one is spared from tragedy and sorrow, the time known as The Troubles.

Patricia forde the last lie