Arts Week with Judy Murphy

Salthill man Jim Ward loves history and loves storytelling, and has combined his passions to work as a tour guide in Galway City and nationally.

Both passions can also be found in his debut novel, No Ordinary Bread, which will be launched next Thursday, March 13, in the city’s Charlie Byrne’s Bookshop.

It’s set in rural China in 1949, at a time of utter upheaval in that vast country. The story is told from the perspective of an old man, looking back and recalling momentous events in his village when he was just a boy of 10.

As local men are away fighting in the civil war between the communists (Red Army)  and nationalists (Kuomintang), a priest arrives and sets up home and chapel there. He’s a Belgian Jesuit and has an enormous influence on the young boy, even as time marches on and war finally reaches the village.

Reared in Salthill, Jim was educated in ‘the Jes’ in Galway City and, during secondary school, had an Irish teacher who’d lived in China in the late 1940s, returning to Ireland when his health failed. Fr Richard Butler didn’t speak a great deal about China but as a teacher, school principal, and all around decent human being, he had a big influence on Jim.

“He came home to die and he lived until 1999,” says Jim of Fr Butler.

The young student loved stories even then, but he was an all-rounder who also shone at maths.

In those days, people who were good at maths studied engineering and that’s what Jim did, opting for industrial engineering.

“Maybe if I had done pure maths, I would have enjoyed it more,” he says.

He graduated from UCG in 1988, when Ireland was in a severe recession.  “I was a year unemployed and it wasn’t good for me,” he says of how it affected his self-worth.

Eventually, he began working in software engineering and, in the late 1990s, fulfilled his long-held dream of doing an MBA, also in Galway, driven by curiosity about business and economics.

Jim also has qualifications in data analysis, and combines his commercial and creative skills in his digital marketing business E-Maginet, which he does in addition to tour guiding.

And throughout his life, he has been writing and drawing.

With this novel, he wanted to explore politics and diverse philosophical beliefs, including Marxism and Christianity, as well as bringing readers on an adventure. The image of the Garden of Eden with its serpent, is present and “there are allegorical references to that throughout”.

Pictured: Jim Ward in Charlie Byrne’s Bookshop with his novel which will be launched there next Thursday. PHOTO: JOE O’SHAUGHNESSY.