Julie McDermot has just been released from ‘The Mental’, the psychiatric institution where her husband committed her after the devastating loss of their two infant children.
Returning to her narrow, lonely life along the canal, Julie is haunted by grief and the aching absence of what might have been.
As she struggles to piece herself back together, an unexpected encounter with a stranger along the canal offers a glimmer of connection and the fragile possibility of hope.
Their encounter also brings long-submerged realities to the surface, to a place where they can no longer be ignored; exploring Ireland’s dark history of institutional incarceration and offering a profound glimpse of hope in a stunning portrait of a woman’s life.
Moving and deeply evocative, this novel is a powerful meditation on sorrow, isolation, and the surprising ways joy can return to even the most broken heart.
ISBN 9781843519720
A winner of the Irish Writers Centre Novel Fair 2024.
A heart-swelling beauty of a debut novel of love, trauma and found family - perfect for fans of Chris Whitaker, Liz Moore and Marilynne Robinson.
In a remote valley in Idaho in 1981, a man, a woman and three children stop running to wash the blood from their hands and bodies. They are the few survivors of a terrible tragedy. Their only choice now is, somehow, to become a family.
Five years earlier, Opal and her husband James arrive in the small mining community of Silver Valley, drawn by promises of fortune and independence.
There they meet Baron Rowe, the charismatic visionary who controls the community with an iron fist. Baron's son Denny has spent his life trying, and failing, to live up to Baron's expectations, and to protect his little sister Maude from their father's excesses.
Soon, a tragic accident will change all their lives. And five years later, change will come again at the barrel of a gun...
ISBN 9781786586636