Description
Book SynopsisIn the early 1900s Mary O'Grady leaves behind the countryside and the family she cares for, to be with her husband in Dublin. Here she puts down new roots and looks forward to the day when she will return to Tullamore with her own sons and daughters. Marriage and motherhood sustain Mary, gradually the memories of her own childhood fade and her life revolves around the secure home she has created. But as her children grow, they seek the freedom of adults as she had done. Slowly Mary comes to realise that a mother's love cannot protect them, as it could not protect herself, from the sorrows and tragedies of life.
Trade ReviewAn impressive body of work * Irish Times *
Beautifully and insightfully captured the reality of rural Ireland, just as remote working renews village life * Irish Independent *
There's the
brilliance with which her fiction gets at the stuff of human interaction, in all its awkwardness, in all the ways in which, muddled and mortified, this interaction will have to do us, because it's all we've got.
There's the immense power with which she depicts the inner lives of women, particularly mothers and widows, women who have no reason to be anything other than honest with themselves about the realities of their situation. Lavin evokes those situations with sympathy and with candor and with, in many cases, a
frank and delicious comedy * Paris Review *
