If you get teary-eyed reading about turf fires and pony traps, this is the book for you.įour men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions-as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer-and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives. Will she succeed? Sentimental and melodramatic to the max. In her struggle to save the farm and open her school, Kate simply wants to preserve the best of Ireland’s past while opening it to the future. She must also deal with her neighbors, the Conways, who have been feuding with the Phelans for generations and now want to take advantage of Ned’s death to seize the Phelan lands. Kate, a trained nurse and teacher, dreams of opening a school for the children of the village, but the parish priest, fearful of secular education, stands in her way. After that, Martha falls apart, sliding into depression, and Ned’s sister Kate Phelan steps in and tries to put Martha back on her feet. Ned’s wife Martha is a trifle conceited, but their marriage is fairly happy-and life goes well for them and their children, Nora and Peter, until Ned is killed in a riding accident. Ned Phelan runs the farm, having inherited it from his drunken father Billy, and he has managed to make something of the place after working long years to overcome his father’s decades of neglect.
Here we are introduced to the Phelans, who have worked their plot of land in County Cork for as long as anyone can remember-which in Ireland is a very long time indeed. The current mania for all things Irish has been responsible, happily, for providing a ready, new audience for the honorable Celtic tradition of the family saga. A nostalgic tale of Ireland in the 1950s, by the popular novelist whose previous labors in this vineyard (Country Days, 1995, etc.) have established her as a master of the genre.
0 kommentar(er)
