Aoibheann Sweeney’s debut novel, Among Other Things, I’ve Taken Up Smoking, is quite simply the story of a girl’s journey from one island to another. Miranda Donnal is a young woman caught between her father’s world as he doggedly translates Ovid in the mythic fog of Crab Island, Maine, where she has grown up motherless, well-educated and utterly lonely, and the draw of New York City, where she is sent by her father after forgoing her college admissions test to work at the Institute for Classical Studies that he founded there decades ago. The story that unfolds in Miranda’s voice is marked by the geographic and generational ambivalence of an emigration narrative, despite the fact that both Sweeney and her heroine were born in New England. “I grew up with an unspellable Gaelic name in Boston,” says Sweeney, “and I got a lot of credit for just being Irish because we were supposed to be the underdogs. I always thought my grandfather came straight from the old sod to here, but actually my great-grandfather came over in the 1880s and married into a very lace curtain Irish family in Queens. His wife, my great-grandmother, died when their children were young, so he sent them home to Ireland to be raised. But by then he was a pretty wealthy merchant, and they were hardly working the land. He was able to send for them to come back and be educated as teenagers in the United States, and eventually they all attended university.