Rex Calloway is the pen name of a descendant of the people in this book. A retired aviation executive, he lives in Australia, at the far end of the emigration the book describes, and has spent twenty years researching the family’s history in Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic, with six research trips to Londonderry and Donegal to walk every townland in these pages. A Sound and Disposing Mind grew out of a set of court papers that survived the burning of the Four Courts in 1922, rolled up and covered in soot — the record of the dispute that divided the two families at its heart. His research appears at bogstown.com, and his earlier work on the Laird family was published in Familia, the journal of the Ulster Historical Foundation. This is his first novel.