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Michael, acting as a narrator, reflects on the transformative summer of 1936 in Ballybeg, Ireland. He juxtaposes the arrival of the family's first radio with the frail return of his uncle, Father Jack, from a leper colony in Africa, establishing a sense of nostalgia tinged with the unease of a changing world.
MICHAEL: When I cast my mind back to that summer of 1936 different kinds of memories offer themselves to me. We got our first wireless set that summer – well, a sort of set; and it obsessed us. And because it arrived as August was about to begin, my Aunt Maggie – She was the joker of the family – sh
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