Puna

"Puna is not very wise."

On a stretch of Korea's south-west coast, where the tide goes out for miles and something with a list walks the mud flats at dusk, mothers once gave their brightest children worthless names, so that whatever counts the bright ones would pass them by.

Grace Walsh carried that custom halfway round the world, to a rain-soaked house in Cork. She had four sons. To the third, Gerald, she gave a single sentence, in a language no one else in the family spoke, and she repeated...