Time After Time

by Molly Keane, Emma Donoghue (Introduction)

Durraghglass is a beautiful mansion in Southern Ireland, now crumbling in neglect. The time is the present - a present that churns with the bizarre passions of its owners' past. The Swifts - three sisters of marked eccentricity, defiantly christened April, May and Baby June, and their only brother, one-eyed Jasper - have little in common, save vivid memories of darling Mummy, and a long lost youth peculiarly prone to acts of treachery.

Into their world comes Cousin Leda from Vienna, a visitor from the past, blind but beguiling - a thrilling guest. But within days, the lifestyle of the Swifts has been dramatically overturned - and desires, dormant for so long, flame fierce and bright as ever.

Genres: Fiction, Ireland, Irish Literature, Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction, 20th Century, Classics

247 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1983

About the author

Molly Keane (20 July 1904 – 22 April 1996) was an Irish novelist and playwright (born Mary Nesta Skrine in Ryston Cottage, Newbridge, County Kildare). She grew up at Ballyrankin in County Wexford and was educated at a boarding school in Bray, County Wicklow. She married Bobby Keane, one of a Waterford squirearchical family in 1938 and had two daughters. She used her married name for her later novels, several of which (Good Behaviour, Time After Time) have been adapted for television. Between 1928 and 1956, she wrote 11 novels, and some of her earlier plays, under the pseudonym M.J. Farrell . Molly was a member of Aosdána. Her husband died suddenly in 1946, and following the failure of a play she published nothing for twenty years. In 1981 Good Behaviour came out under her own name; the manuscript, which had languished in a drawer for many years, was lent to a visitor, the actress Peggy Ashcroft, who encouraged Keane to publish it. The novel was warmly received and was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize.

After the death of her husband, Molly Keane moved to Ardmore, County Waterford, a place she knew well, and lived there with her two daughters, Sally and Virginia, until she died in 1996. She is buried beside the Church of Ireland church, almost in the centre of the village.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Jane · Rating 4 out of 5]

In Time After Time Molly Keane extends an invitation to an Irish country house. It’s an invitation that I am very glad that I accepted.

The house was once beautiful, but it has fallen upon hard times. The kitchen still offers a welcome, but the cooks and kitchen maids who brought it to life have long since departed, and even the Aga is losing the will to go on.

The kitchen is Jasper’s domain. Well actually the whole house and estate is his, but he has to share it with his three elderly sisters. One widow and two spinsters, all left a right of residence by darling Mummie, whose wishes none of her children would ever question.

He’s an aesthete and a dreamer, and he’s also bright enough to know that whoever rules the kitchen rules the house. Well they would if they didn’t have to contend with his sisters.

April, the only one to have married, is now widowed, and in her mind that places her way above her siblings. But her husband is long gone and now her life centres around her clothes, her beauty treatments, and her home comforts…

May’s life is filled with domestic arts. She is president of the Flower Arrangers’ Guild for year, she is a dab hand at making pictures from scraps of tweed, wool and sprigs of heather…

And Baby June is the practical one, managing the farm, always outside, always with something important to do…

Each of the Swifts has a cross to bear: Jasper lost an eye, April is stone deaf, May has a deformed hand, and Baby June, well Baby June is rather slow… And each of them tries to fill their lives with the important things they do, with possession, with the cats and dogs who are so cosseted in the absence of children. They live together, bickering like children because they are unhappy with their lives.

The portraits that Molly Keane paints of the Swift siblings as they move through their lives are so rich, so vivid and so wonderfully detailed.

Grotesques. Realism. Comedy. Tragedy. Only Molly Keane can balance all of those elements to such fine effect.

I laughed, I cried, and I wanted to scream at them to admit that they were unhappy, that there lives didn’t have to be ruled by what their mother had thought in a different age, that they could change their lives. But I knew that they wouldn’t have listened, and that even if they had they wouldn’t have believed me.

The pictures change when cousin Leda comes to visit. As a child she was that little bit different, and the Swifts didn’t know quite how to react. To pay court or to close ranks. And it is just the same now that Leda is a widow and has lost her sight. How like children they all are.

Leda says things, does things, crosses lines that the Swifts never would. And of course there are consequences. When finally she leaves they realise that life will never be the same again.

It’s still comic, it’s still tragic, it’s still grotesque, and it’s still real.

Now that I have left too I miss the whole household. As is so often the case with Molly Keane’s creations, I really wouldn’t want to meet them but they are quite wonderful to observe.

A wonderful entertainment!

[JimZ · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5 stars for me… 😕 🤨😐

I think if I had bothered to read up on the context in which Molly Keane was raised, I would have appreciated this novel more.
• Molly Keane was born … in County Kildare 1904, into a family whose roots lay in the Anglo-Norman conquest of Ireland. The backdrop to her life was characterised by the endless political turmoil following the 1916 Easter Rising and the brutality of the Black and Tan war.
• Her family lived in a big house Ballyrankin in County Wexford which was less dramatically affected by these events than some parts of the country. After the Irish Peace Treaty was passed in 1921 establishing the Irish Free State the traditional life of the “Big House” Protestants continued albeit in a more impoverished scale. While their obsession with horses and hunting remained undiminished, they made do with second-hand riding boots and worn or thread bare jackets. (https://www.mollykeane.com/about-moll... )
• Her parents were part of the Irish-Anglo aristocracy that was fading fast. I just read a novel that occurred in the same time period, come to think of it, by Elizabeth Bowen – The Last September.

Oddly enough I loved Good Behaviour without such knowledge…. I did not like ‘Time After Time’ as much, but again had I known just a bit more I would have better understood her characters in this novel. They were from that generation of Big House Protestants that were on their way out….the estate of theirs was already run down and although their parents had servants and maids, they had none.

This was one of those books where nobody was endearing…I liked nobody at the beginning of the novel and this feeling of dislike for everybody was pretty much there for the remainder of it. I guess I felt sorry for two of the sisters, Baby June and May…because of their handicaps ...May had a deformed hand and June was dyslexic. Come to think of it, everybody had something wrong with them…April was growing deaf, Jasper had only one eye because his other was shot out accidentally with an air rifle by June when she was 7. Then there’s cousin Leda who is blind. About half of the novel is about her and her visit to Durraghglass and why she is visiting (not the best of intentions….not a friendly visit).

Reviews (all the reviews were positive):
• Anne Tyler wrote this review! https://www.washingtonpost.com/archiv...
• Good review, gives a nice description of the book’s plot and it characters without giving too much away if you want to read this before reading the novel: https://beautyisasleepingcat.com/2020...
• https://readingmattersblog.com/2009/0...
• Besides reviewing ‘Time After Time’, Heavenly Ali also reviews another book (novella) that I highly recommend, ‘The Visitor’, by another Irish author, Maeve Brennan: https://heavenali.wordpress.com/2021/...

[Mela · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book was full of glum and of life disappointments. In a way, Good Behaviour was such too, but a bit less, I think, at least I don't remember feeling so "oppressed" as I do now. The fact is, both novels Molly Keane wrote in the last years of her life when she was almost eighty years old, so perhaps they were so "sour" because of it. I am curious what is the tone of her first novels.

Back to the story. It was a deep fascinating study. I would say the characters' lives were full of many big and small disappointments. Their life was broken, etc. Yet, when I think longer about it, I must admit, that they coped and took what they could from life, considering their life circumstances, the times they lived in, their personalities, etc.

It is hard to take joy from such stories. They need a proper mood to read, and time and attention to understand the depth of them.

By the way, the funny thing is that despite of kind of happy ending, I still feel morose.

[3-3.5 stars]

[Liina · Rating 4 out of 5]

A cat with the best name in literature (Mr. Minkles nonetheless), three dogs and an eccentric family consisting of a brother and three sisters. All somehow deformed - half blind, missing fingers or half deaf. Living all together in a big Irish country house, against their own wish ("Mother wanted it to be like that"). And in comes long lost cousin Leda from Vienna who quite stirs the pot.
Such crushed ambitions, childhood dramas that left wounds that are felt still, in old age. All in the sauce of dark humour yet not without compassion. The way Keane builds her characters is simply amazing. It is the little quirks and often dreams/ambitions that didn't realise, that make the person. And Keane knows that very well.
Can't wait to read more from her.

[Andrew · Rating 3 out of 5]

My first Molly Keane and I don't think it will be my last as this darkly comic novel was a unique piece of writing about a strange and eccentric family which I enjoyed.
The Swift family comprise 3 sisters April, May , and June and their brother Jasper. Now elderly they are tied to each other in living in the derelict Irish mansion after their mother left the property to them equally. Constantly bickering and at each other's throats it is a situation waiting to explode. The sibling have their own disabilities; April the only one who was married is deaf, May has only two fingers on one hand, and June struggles with literacy , while Jasper has one eye after a childhood shooting incident involving June. All have memories of a cousin Leda who lived with them in childhood in the 1930's but suddenly disappeared without explanation.
One day Leda appears on their doorstep. Now blind and apparently , as Jewish, having escaped the camps ends up staying and causing mayhem as she manipulates and causes rifts among the Swifts. the only one not touched by her schemes is June who works on the farm holding but who sees Leda using her wiles to have June's beloved farm hand taken from her.
The book sparkles with vitriol and nastiness with characters who you cannot fail to dislike but sometimes the joy is in the storytelling and the anarchic wit. Definitely an unusual book which makes me want to read more and find out about the author.

[Mary Harrison · Rating 1 out of 5]

Read this on the advice of a good friend who found it funny, perceptive, cruel, witty, beautifully written. I'm afraid that I thought it dull and tedious.

[Cynthia Dunn · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5

[Hester · Rating 4 out of 5]

Four elderly single siblings arrested in their childhood rivalries and still living in the vast and dilapidated Big House bequeathed to the only son by their mother, on condition his three sisters live there . We are still in Molly Keane's mannered and spiky Anglo Irish World but any power and wealth has dwindled to nothing leaving the four , all of whom carry a disability and all of whom have light infantry in the form of their indulged and combative dogs or cats , to carry out an internecine gorilla warfare. They are old , proud and irrelevant and the world has moved on . The house and grounds cry out for the army of servants that once maintained it but now reduced to a single farm hand that the siblings bicker over .

Lost in their own fantasies and barely allowing the reality of a changing Ireland outside their gates to penetrate it is the arrival of a disruptive ghost from their childhood who stirs the pot . Leda, forever linked in time to a family tragedy and long thought dead , is monstrous . Blind but all seeing she flatters then dances emotionally with each sibling in turn , apart from the simple Baby June, and is malevolently plotting her own ascendancy .

Keane is masterful at sly comedy, pacing , structure and sudden drama but here she has sacrificed depth of character for the dynamic plot . So we have four grotesques and a novel that edges towards the Gothic . April , May, June and Jasper are fossilized in their isolation and their deeply entrenched encounters and reactions reinforce the stereotypes .

Keane moves them deftly about the set in order to set off emotional fireworks that splutter and die under the heavy blanket of manners , self deception and selfishness but brings the whole precarious edifice to a grand finale where necessary improvisation, all gloriously plotted like the end of a pantomime and all in a single day, releases then all from their self imposed prison .

[Amy Gentry · Rating 1 out of 5]

Oof. This is the closest I've come so far to hating a Molly Keane book. There's some good in it, as usual, but nothing remotely good enough to balance out its nastiness around sex, homosexuality, physical disability, and even (deep breath) the Holocaust. To be entirely fair, the last is clumsy misuse rather than true malignancy--but the twist near the end (the manipulative houseguest Leda was lying all along about being a Holocaust survivor, as well as past ties and grievances with the family) sanitizes it without justifying it in the slightest. I am bewildered and disgusted by a racist caricature that appears near the end of the book. Even Devoted Ladies had more going for it. People who prefer this book to other Keanes because of its "happy ending" have a different definition of happy than I do.

[Geertje · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was quite a wicked, vicious little book. Everyone in it is desperately unhappy, and as a result they're all nasty and mean to each other.

That being said, I enjoyed myself plenty whilst reading it. The build-up is perhaps a bit slow (it takes quite a while before the promised cousin Leda arrives), but that ultimately results in a great pay-off; I've laughed out loud several times during the penultimate chapter.

Keane has allowed the Swift siblings a happy end, and that I appreciate, too.

A funny sort of book, darkly comical and sly.

[Trelawn · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting and quirky read. The characters were fun and eccentric but I never felt invested in any of them. After a while I was just going through the motions. When the action finally picked up it was a slight let down. The best part was the final chapter. I wouldn't rush out to pick up another of her works.

[Thea Bennett · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is fantastic. A tragic-comic tale of aging siblings in thrall to their past in a crumbling house in rural Ireland. Stunning descriptions of the house and the landscape, and spot-on characterisation. This is a book I have read many times, and each time I find something new to love.

[Katherine Cowley]

Mixed feelings about this book.

The writing is brilliant and witty, with a fascinating voice. It completely defies notions of the three-act structure, and yet the story keeps moving forward.

Yet it uses disability as a symbol for the characters, to show that they are broken and their relationships are broken. Each of the characters is disabled, and to an extent these disabilities are treated with nuance and respect, but there are definitely some problematic ableist undertones throughout.

[Ape · Rating 4 out of 5]

Seriously, what a fantastic book. And another fantastic writer I'd not heard of until I picked up this book (along with a few others by her). And it has possibly the best fictional cat's name I've read to date - Mister Minkles.

Set in Ireland in the 1980s (I'm guessing), this is a tale of the four Swift siblings, all elderly ladies and one gent, living in poverty on the family estate which is gradually falling apart around them. Life's kind of been a let down to them, and they generally don't get on too fantastically, but they're all trapped together, with their pets in this house. The only male sibling, is Jasper, whose passions are his cats, cooking, gardening and talking to Brother Anselm of the neighbouring property. Then in descending order of age, there are: April, the most youthful and vain of the sisters, and the only one to have married and escaped the estate for some time. She is obsessed by diets and health fads. May: smoking sister, an artistic and crafty type lady who is very talented and lordy she knows it, and enjoys lecturing people about these things. She also has a secret shop lifting habit. And finally there's June, a little rough diamond who runs the failing farm and worries about the pigs and horses more than her family. All have their disfigurements and faults, Jasper lost an eye as a child, April is utterly deaf, May has a disfigured hand with only one and a half fingers, and June is illiterate and tiny like a child - in fact she's often referred to as Baby June.

And in steps in a particularly vile villain you've got to love to hate. Cousin Leda, from Austria, whom they've not seen since they were teenagers. They'd just kind of assumed she was killed in the gas chambers during WWII (her father was Jewish) - in fact what Leda was getting up to during the war is just another example of her self-involved, narcisstic vileness (yep, I couldn't stand the woman!). Leda's own disability is blindness, and she arrives unannouced at the estate, back to torment the siblings and to stay for weeks. As she is blind and in love with herself, she is convinced she is still a youthful, beautiful attractive girl, when in fact she is old and unattractive, and I'm sure the word toad is used about in. But everyone is excited about cousin Leda, and they're all desperate to be her new best friend. And like any good sociopath, she plays them off against one another and to her own advantage. Looking to seduce Jasper, thinking his voice reminds her of his father, whom she was convinced was in love with her when she was a young teenager.

Her web is spun and her traps laid, but who will get it in the end? Although no one comes to a sticky end, I think everyone gets their just deserts by the end of the book and I just love what karma has in store for dear cousin Leda.

[Grace Harwood · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the fantastically funny, deliciously dark, incredibly insightful story of a crumbling Irish stately home and the very unusual family who are the custodians of it. In decaying Durraghglass, live the Swifts, Jasper, April, May and Baby June (who is 64 years old, but can't shake off her old pet name). The most wonderful thing about the family (apart from their determination to live in the past) is that they all utterly despise each other, but are bound together by the ghost of Edwardian Mummie, who has shackled them all to the ruins of the house by the terms of her will. Each tries to live separate lives - Jasper in his filthy kitchen and his nursery quarters, April with her expensive clothes and drink and drug habits, May with her flower arranging and kitchen garden and June with her horses and the farm work. They each suffer a disability - Jasper only has one eye, April is stone deaf, May has a maimed hand and June is none too clever. Into this mix, comes cousin Leda, completely blind and bringing with her visions of the past - after all, she can't see how Durraghglass (or its inhabitants) have aged. She can only see the bright days of the past as it was in her earliest memories.

The characterisation in this novel is utterly brilliant - Jasper and the sisters are just fantastic, as is vindictive, power-hungry Leda. The reader is just swept along with the action and, I've got to say, it contains one of the most fantastically outrageous argument/fight scenes I've ever read. When Leda loses it over breakfast - I was laughing and laughing. It was just so enjoyable to read. The prose is as clear as April's and May's cut-glass accents.

Of course, there are all sorts of undercurrents and themes going on - How the family pull together and the reader comes to realise that without each other, they just cannot manage at all, despite the fact that they are driving each other mad. Jasper's realisation that they are all flawed is beautifully understated: "..he set himself to the construction of the perfect sandwich of his imagination. Leda didn't deserve it, of course, but who did?"


I cannot recommend this book enough, it is such an enjoyable read.

[A. Mary · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an unusual story, and it takes time to sort out how to feel and think about it. Keane takes considerable time to draw each of her four sibling characters (April, May, Jasper, and June), and she introduces them in isolation from each other, even though they live together in their family home. It may be an exaggeration to say they live "together," but they are all there, and they do take meals together. Only April has ever married, but Mummie's will secured the right-of-residence for each of her children, and April returned in her widowhood. They are a motley bunch: April is beautiful, elegant, and deaf; May is creative and has a malformed hand; Jasper is forgetful, messy, and missing an eye; Baby June is hard-working, horsey, and dyslexic. They are closed to each other, wounded within as surely as on the surface. A reader needs to be patient in order for the groundwork to be laid here, and I understand why Keane took such time and space to put her players in place, but I found it difficult to care about them (except for June) because their secrets excluded me (I understand why this, too), at the same time as there was no action or interaction to engage me. Halfway through, the story gets traction, when a previously peripheral character appears and the threads become a weaving. The writing is rock solid, with some lovely turns of phrase. There are moments of sharp meanness, surely also of clever amusements. By the end, I felt strongly about every character, including the secondary ones. I like the collective outcomes. If I were a more patient reader, I would have given four stars, and I suspect that if I read the book again, I'd be that more patient reader.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book belongs to a very specific genre - that of the shabby-genteel, slightly eccentric, Anglo-Irish family, still living in the manor house, which is now crumbling around them, as they struggle to keep up appearances, and spend a significant amount of time living in the past. Manor house novels are Keane’s stock in trade – over the span of her career (writing as M.J. Farrell) she has joined other writers such as Elizabeth Bowen, Joyce Cary, Jennifer Johnston and William Trevor in documenting the behavior and mores of the declining Irish Protestant Ascendancy.

Conflicted loyalties, class resentment, and nostalgia for a dying way of life are common themes in this particular branch of Anglo-Irish literature and each surfaces to some extent in “Time After Time”. Given that it was written when Keane was 80, it’s not too surprising that nostalgia for the past looms large throughout the book.

Keane’s novels are generally light-hearted, more driven by character than by plot, and this one is no exception. I enjoyed this book for the virtues it shares with her previous work – she documents her characters’ foibles and eccentricities with a clear eye, but also with genuine wit and obvious affection.

So this is a fun book, though don’t look for profundity. And while Keane is a talented writer, William Trevor remains the undisputed master of the genre.

[Austen to Zafón · Rating 2 out of 5]

It was okay. I like Keane's earlier books better. These characters were hard to like and the writing had a kind of "dahling" brittleness to it that was annoying and detracted from the story. It was certainly no "Good Behavior."

[Karen Lowe · Rating 2 out of 5]

A difficult book to take to as all the characters are unremittingly dreadful. It did pick up half way through with the arrival of calculating cousin Leda, and towards the end, the plot resolution made me think more kindly of it.

[Jeannette · Rating 4 out of 5]

Molly Keane is superb at writing of eccentric, flawed characters. A dark, humorous and engaging novel.

[Kitty · Rating 3 out of 5]

ammu enam ei tea, miks ma otsustasin, et seda raamatut on vaja lugeda, igatahes ootas ta mitu aastat järjekorras. polnud lihtne hankida ka.

selline... 20. sajandi romaan (MK eluaastad olid 1904-1996, "Time After Time" ilmus 1983). neid jääb viimasel ajal harva näppu, ikka tundub, et uuemaid asju on parajasti olulisem lugeda. aga vahepeal tore meenutada, et jah, nii kirjutatigi ja sellised raamatud olidki. mingit erilist möllu ei toimu, mingit erilist moraali ka (vist?) ei ole, lihtsalt üks pigem hubane lugu.

tegutseb üks omamoodi perekond, kolm pensionieas õde ja nende vend, kes elavad koos oma lagunevas Iirimaa härrastemajas, igaühel oma mured (üks kurdivõitu, teisel puudu silm, kolmandal mõned sõrmed, neljandal on... tänapäeval vast öeldaks õpiraskused) ja oma saladused ka. siis ilmub välja ja kolib sisse ammu surnuks peetud nõbu ja kõigi elu raputatakse segi. aga niiviisi... leebelt.

kõik see läks käima aeglaselt ja andis mulle palju aega pead murda, miks ma seda ikkagi loen, aga mida edasi, seda põnevamaks läks (kuigi jah, suurt midagi nagu ikkagi ei juhtunud) ja lõpp oli juba täiesti haarav. üllatav ka.

[Eileen · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this on the plane to Portland, and in the hotel that night.

Later Molly Keane seems quite a bit different than earlier, and I'm trying to parse exactly why. The characters here are drawn as to be almost slapstick, but it's not as though Keane presented no slapstick characters before. The plot, and particularly the climax, is not as convincing as I'd like it to be. The whole business is less lighthearted and more depressing, even though it's also definitely funny.

Really, I want to draw a parallel to Cold Comfort Farm, but that parallel is imperfect. We start with a set family living set lives on a set rural English farm; a visitor, cousin Leda, comes in to wreak havoc. But the family is no Starkadder clan; instead, Jasper, April, May, and Baby June seem not just rut-ridden but personally stunted, trapped not by their own physical forms but by their mindsets. The visitor is definitely no light and orderly Flora Poste; instead, Leda maliciously plays each character to get any advantage she can.

The end result is only semi-satisfying.

[Margaret Capozzolo · Rating 3 out of 5]

My second Molly Keane novel this year, and, thank goodness, an improvement over the first, "Devoted Ladies." It pleases me to know that Ms. Keane grew a little kinder as she grew older. ("Devoted Ladies" was written in 1934; this book in 1983.) Still, she, like her earlier compatriots, Somerville and Ross (Edith Somerville and Violet Florence Martin), presents a composite picture of the twentieth-century Anglo-Irish that is distinctly unflattering, honest though it may be. There is a cruelness to the way the aged members of the Swift family--April, May, June, and brother Jasper--hone in on each other's sore spots and rub them mercilessly. But cruelest of all is their cousin Leda, whose mother married (horrors!) a Jew. Banished from the house years earlier as a teenager, she turns up again as an old woman, blindly (literally and figuratively) bent on revenge. Spoiler alert: Not least among the kindlier aspects of this Keane novel is its happy-turn-of-events ending.

[Jan Mills · Rating 4 out of 5]

A sharp and witty tale of three elderly sisters and an elderly brother forced to live together in their much depleted family mansion by the terms of 'darling Mummie's' will. None of them likes or understands the others, each in their own way is maimed: Jasper lost an eye in a shooting accident; April is profoundly deaf; May was born with a deformed hand and Baby June is dyslexic. They live in barely-concealed animosity in their crumbling home, but reasonably peacefully, until the return of their cousin, Leda (last seen when they were all young before the war)who is now blind. She proceeds to turn their lives upside down, revealing secrets that each would prefer to remain hidden. It is wickedly funny in a gentle, ambling sort of way.

[Anna · Rating 2 out of 5]

Speaking personally, it was a bit of a slog. I’d never read Molly Keane before, I didn’t find it particularly funny and the characters are mostly awful. Maybe it’s a generational thing, parts of it were cleverly constructed and the prose was sometimes very good, but it could also feel dense. What was not said or left very late worked well. It’s lies common to read about the elderly, especially when they all dislike each other and each have their own disability - perhaps this has not aged well, some comments/phrases have not although the central premise survives. The brother is a cat-person, the sisters are all dog-people (but only their own) and the cousin quite possibly is the most selfish of all…

[Susanna · Rating 4 out of 5]

A funny and intriguing tale of four elderly siblings, each handicapped or disabled in some way, who live together in the once grand but now crumbling family home in Ireland. Their strange but fairly harmonious co-existence is disrupted by the arrival of their cousin (equally elderly and equally disabled) who discreetly wreaks havoc. Having thrown the pieces of their lives in the air she expects to depart in triumph, having got her revenge for past wrongs, but the pieces fall and reassemble in unexpected ways. There is a happy ending, of sorts. Grotesque, slightly gothic, and in parts simply hilarious.

[Jo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Story takes place on a deteriorating Irish estate. An elderly brother and his two sisters are living on the estate, and each, needless to say, are a character in their own right. Some of the stuff they did made me laugh. Some of it was just pathetic (due to that holding on to privilege when it clearly isn't holding on to you!) Then someone from their past comes into the scene and stirs up the mud. I think the context of the story, and probably the location, too, reminded me of an Iris Murdoch book. It was NOT that well written (compared to Murdoch), but it was a similar type story. Nice for a little amusing escapism.

[Chrissie]

The author, also writing under the name of M.J. Farrell, has been compared to William Trevor, Joyce Carey, Jennifer Johnston and Elizabeth Bowen--all of whom I have enjoyed--so I thought I'd give this a try too!

[Emily · Rating 2 out of 5]

The four Swift siblings live together in their crumbling Irish manor house. Each has a disability he or she must compensate for, and each take turns insulting and belittling the others and revenging both past and present slights. Then the long lost cousin arrives to be waited upon and gather the secrets of the Swifts so that she can reveal them in the most appalling manor.
This is a book about nasty people being nasty to each other. The only good thing about it is that in the end they all get theirs.

[Margaret Drake · Rating 3 out of 5]

This story includes much Irish vocabulary which I have never heard before. It did not engage me until about page 100 and then the story finally took off. The ending for me was neither positive nor negative but also without resolution. Frequently, I felt confused by who was talking or what actually happened. I suppose she could be called an impressionist writer for all the reader is required to add to the story from their own knowledge of people or Ireland.