Time Present, and Time Past

by Deirdre Madden

A quiet but emotionally resonant portrait of a middle-class family in pre-crash Ireland, Deirdre Madden’s latest novel is understated and gorgeously crafted. Madden touches upon abstract ideas in a clear and accessible way, letting her characters graze past one another even as they search for intimacy and closeness. In tightly controlled prose, this beguiling novel meditates on the passage of time and the futility of memory by dwelling on the actions and preoccupations of everyday people.

Genres: Fiction, Ireland, Irish Literature, Literary Fiction, Book Club, Ebooks, Female Authors

235 pages, Kindle Edition

First published May 28, 2013

About the author

Deirdre Madden is from Toomebridge, County Antrim in Northern Ireland. She was educated at Trinity College, Dublin and at the University of East Anglia. In 1994 she was Writer-in-Residence at University College, Cork and in 1997 was Writer Fellow at Trinity College, Dublin. She has travelled widely in Europe and has spent extended periods of time in both France and Italy.

Reviews

[Roger Brunyate · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Beauty of the Ordinary

We have become so used to reading about dysfunctional families in fiction that it is a rare delight to meet a happy one. Fintan Buckley is a fiftyish Dublin lawyer, married to a warm and unpretentious woman named Colette, and father of two college-age sons, Rob and Niall, and a seven-year-old daughter, Lucy, the love of his life. Although disillusioned with his work, he looks forward to coming home at night to their home by the sea on the rocky promontory of Howth, where the family evening meal is the happiest hour of his day. It is a daring novelist who can embrace such simplicity as her subject. This is a miracle of a book.

At the end of one of these meals, Fintan asks the family to sit still for a moment, without moving.

Bemused, they look at each other, but do as requested. For a short time they sit in silence, like worshipping Quakers waiting for the Spirit to move through the room.

A few chapters later, he recalls that moment:

Now he thinks that maybe it had had something to do with the idea of stopping time, of working against just this rush of life that he finds so disturbing. He had wanted to keep the moment, to preserve it, and even by the strangeness of his request to make of it something that they might all remember.

Stopping time. For Fintan appears to be suffering from some kind of sporadic hallucination, when he feels himself to be in the present and the past simultaneously. He becomes interested in old photographs and the other lives they reveal, both of his own family and the world in general. Very gently, Madden begins to unfurl their various back-stories: the courtship of Fintan and Colette; his affection for his sister Martina, and the secret that made her return to Ireland after many years in London; the difficult relationship of both siblings with their mother, but their love for their Aunt Beth; and the trips they used to make to relatives on a farm across the Ulster border, until these were abruptly stopped without reason. Deirdre Madden is not so sappy as to write a book lacking grit and a bit of mystery, but all the revelations have the effect of deepening one's understanding and feeling for the beauty of ordinary life.

I have recently reviewed The Years by Virginia Woolf, another family novel that celebrates the ordinary details of life rather than its extraordinary upheavals. I would wager that Madden is also an admirer of Woolf. There is a remarkable passage towards the end of this short book (a novella really) where she suddenly skips ahead by several decades, answering T. S. Elliot's time present and time past with time future—a passage that reminds me of the extraordinary time-telescoping interlude in To the Lighthouse. But this novella differs from The Years in one significant respect: whereas Woolf's family, the Pargiters, move outwards from their center like ripples in time, Madden's Buckleys remain together as a family in every important respect, living in the present, accepting the future, and looking back with something like contentment:

All of that was more than ten years ago, and this is the reality of her life now: old age, Martina, and this house, where the morning sun warms the fur of the sleeping cat, and touches everything it falls upon with eternity.

[Lea · Rating 3 out of 5]

I discovered Deirdre Madden in an Oxfam shop this summer, and her novels "Hidden Symptons" (1986) and "One by One in the Darkness" (1996) are among the best books I've read this year. I was really looking forward to a more recent novel of her and very excited to dive into "Time Present and Time Past", her latest novel from 2013 - only 9 years ago!

First, the good: I breezed through this short novel, and, again, I loved how Madden describes people, their unique POVs and relationships. I thought setting the novel in Dublin in 2006, with the Irish economic crisis looming but not quite there, was interesting. I also appreciated that this novel felt quite different to her other two I've read. The Troubles are present and Northern Ireland is in the background, but it's otherwise firmly settled in Dublin with a little bit of London thrown into the mix. Although there is very little of a story to speak of, I didn't mind it much, because it's an interesting portrayal of a family, that ended up feeling quite real to me. I liked the merging of the mundane and hallucinations.

The negative: At times this novel was very clumsy and heavy-handed. I attribute it to being a "thesis" novel about "time measured in photographs" and, also, the economic crisis as an effect on a family, even if only in the futuristic glances and foreboding. I especially disliked the second to last chapter, that was written from an eagle eye perspective, commenting on the family and the future of Ireland, in a really weird way. Breaking the fourth wall is always hard to do, especially in a serious literary way, and it didn't land. Up until then it was a 4 star read for me, but the metaness was a wrong choice. Still, I appreciate the author trying out different things and I'm very much looking forward to reading her other novels, once I get my hand on them.

[Barbara · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a beautifully written book about contemporary Ireland on the verge of the economic collapse. It is about our present and our pasts, and the memories, the people who are important to us, and those that slip away. Some who slipped away in this story are the family in Northern Ireland. At some point during The Troubles, the children stopped visiting their grandmother and grew up with no further contact. Madden grew up in Northern Ireland, in Toomebridge, next to Lough Neagh. In a recent interview, she said that The Troubles are always in her book at some level [http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013...
This melancholy is not heavy, but it lingers. Even though she is writing about Dublin, and people who are well off, there is a sadness in the book. I just discovered that Madden is married to the poet Harry Clifden.

[Carol Douglas · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a lovely novel about ordinary, decent people living in Dublin. There's an elegiac quality to it, appropriate to the title. The book is set just before the collapse of the "Celtic Tiger" in the late '2000s. There are memories of the past, but the past is past, not dominant.

The characters are refreshing. The husband and father, Fintan, is a lawyer who considers himself "the most unimaginative man in Ireland," a thought the most unimaginative man is unlikely to have. Colette, the wife and mother, is characterized primarily by kindness. It's good to see a portrayal of a happy marriage. Their three children are good and healthy. One doesn't expect to see such a happy family in books, except for the Brunettis in crime novels of Donna Leon. Joan, Fintan's mother, is bullying, but that hasn't spoiled his life. His sister, Martina, has a painful secret in her past, but she copes.

I enjoyed the novel, but I was frustrated with the author's telescoping what will happen to the family after the economic collapse. I would rather have seen it portrayed in the way Madden portrays their daily life beforehand.

[Gary · Rating 4 out of 5]

Irish novelist Deirdre Madden's ninth novel, Time Present, and Time Past, takes its title from the “Burnt Norton” section of T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets: “Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future, / And time future contained in time past.” It tells the story of Fintan Buckley, a Dublin legal adviser (described as "a strong contender for the title of Most Unimaginative Man in Ireland"), who at age 47 is facing an existential crisis in his domestic and family life. On the surface, Fintan appears to have very happy life, that is until he begins experiencing "strange shifts of perception" affecting time and memory, which ultimately lead to some rather dark revelations involving Fintan, his sister (Martina), and their emotionally distant mother (Joan). Along the way, one is reminded of of Faulkner's observation in Requiem for a Nun: “The past is never dead. It's not even past.” Madden's luminous novel is many things: subtle, intriguing, somewhat melancholy, and thoughtful. After all, what more could one hope for in a novel?

[Cathleen · Rating 5 out of 5]

In Time Present, and Time Past, Deirdre Madden zooms in on several members of one extended Dublin family, in alternating chapters, so the reader sees them as they are, as they were, and in certain instances, as they will become. Standard demarcations of time are mere accounting conveniences. The past is all around us, as is the future.

The novel is a meditation on time--shown especially through Fintan Buckley. He is an ordinary man, but there's always more to the ordinary person than anyone sees at first glance. A man in his middle years, he experiences "auditory hallucinations." In any other language, they'd be called daydreams, elastic moments when he temporarily drifts away and either re-visualizes or remembers events in the past--or the future. He's a man of deep emotion that he usually keeps confined and tidy in his role as father, husband, and legal advisor. Life surprises--like his wife's unexpected pregnancy in middle age--have given them Lucy, a shot of joy, a child who Fintan feels he's been the best father for and he can most unselfconsciously love.

The "big" things in Fintan's life--marriage, family, career, home--are steady, always evolving but stable and smooth like the barely perceptible movement of a fine and finely tuned engine. Maybe that's why he has more head space to lapse into imagining the spaces surrounding old photographs, first of Dublin in the early 20th century, then into more extensive territory: photos of people, photos of his family. So strong are his sensory experiences that Fintan thinks that he, "Fintan Buckley, hitherto a strong contender for the title of most unimaginative man in Ireland...might look up from his book and find himself back in the distant past."

The past may be all around, but it is neither more exotic nor more gilded than Fintan might think. Or so says Niall, Fintan's son. He's the voice of empiricism, the counterweight to Fintan's subjectivities and intuitions. Imagining that the past has a different texture is misguided and just plain inaccurate, he tells Fintan while they share a pot of tea. The past would not be Masterpiece Theater; it "would smell of horse piss and horse shit" and of "nursing someone with diarrhea in a home with no bathroom." It's a fabrication, devised by people promoting a heritage view of the past, a time "more banal than we give it credit for, but also more complicated." Fintan listens and considers his son's position, but follows his photographs further and further into the past, and finding one, a photograph of his sister, himself and a long-lost cousin from when they were summer playmates during family visits to Northern Ireland. It's his fascination with that photo that drives the rest of his plot line.

Other family members, too, have their own stories and memories, interconnecting with and around each other. None is at all like the other, but all are dependent upon each other. Ultimately, the novel is both melancholic and hopeful--registering the power and illusions of time.

[Dina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very quaint book about family and growing old. Not much happens, but I think I understand Irish people more. Would recommend.

[Michele · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book. It is the first Deirdre Madden I have read. I am hooked. Some reviewers have set out what the book is about, so I won't repeat that here, other than to say the book insightfully portrays the finer points about family relationships in a middle class contemporary family. It is set in the Dublin Bay town of Howth. The book beautifully captures the reflective and thoughtful side of life. The reader quickly gets to know the people in the book intimately and in a way that matters. The book is slow paced and domestic in its scope. I found that a strength. It speaks of the extraordinary thoughts of everyday people in everyday lives. This book may not change your life but it will touch it.

[michelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my favorite passages from this beautifully written work.

"Tonight, as so often, all of Ireland lies under a soft thick blanket of cloud. The wind rises, and soon it begins to rain.
But none of them hears it: only the cat, awake and alert, sitting in total darkness at the top of the stairs in Beth and Martina’s house; only the cat lifts its head and listens to the sound of the raindrops. And if either woman, in the drowsiness of sleep, were to suddenly switch on the light and come upon it there on the landing, the cat, with its folded paws and perfect markings, might well appear to them fabulous as a unicorn."

[Robert Wechsler · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are times when this novel seems like a conventional story of an extended Irish family over the years, whose secrets slowly are revealed. But it’s much more than this. First of all, the writing is, for the most part, fresh and excellent. Second, the novel’s title theme is presented in the form of tense changes, sometimes almost as if they were key changes (but I do have a beef: Madden uses the past perfect tense (instead of the present perfect) in present tense sections, which hit me like a false note; the form of her subjunctive verbs is another false note in this book, as in so many).

[CanadianReader · Rating 4 out of 5]

The focal point of Madden's lyrical reflection on time, memory, and nostalgia is Fintan Buckley--a middle-aged, moderately successful, and happily married lawyer--who is surprised to find himself lapsing into a sort of mystical reflectiveness. Fintan's problem all along, according to his prickly, imposing and stylish elderly mother is that he is possessed of too much heart--"functionally intelligent" but deficient in the ambition that she herself possessed as a young woman--ambition that was thwarted by her overbearing father who did not believe in education for girls. In the Buckley family, one is either a hawk or a dove. Fintan is the latter.

Fintan is experiencing a mid-life re-evaluation of sorts, one that finds him revisiting the past. His university-aged son points out that the past Fintan sees is viewed through rose-coloured glasses--devoid of the unpleasant smells and hardness of real life. Fintan is mistaking the medium for the reality, says Niall. Fintan's sister, the strikingly beautiful Marita, previously a high-end fashion buyer in London, has within the last couple of years returned abruptly to Dublin after a trauma which is eventually revealed. More estranged from their mother than Fintan, she initially sought refuge in the Dublin home of her aunt and uncle, a house little changed from the days of Uncle Christy's deceased parents. When Christy suddenly dies, Marita stays on with her beloved aunt in the house of old things.

Marita's relationship with the past stands in contrast to Fintan's. So painful is the experience that landed her back in Ireland that she has walled off part of her memory. The siblings make a sort of peace with the past by reconnecting with a cousin whom they haven't seen since late childhood. During that long-ago time, so the story goes, their mother stopped their trips to the north because of The Troubles. However, it was more than that: Fintan and Marita's mother seems to have been repelled by the dirtiness of the rural farming life of her husband's family, underscoring her sense that she has married below herself. The visit Fintan and Marita end up making to cousin Edward and the farm in the north allows a reconciliation of past and present for both siblings.

Madden's book is generally beautifully rendered. I say "generally" because about four-fifths of the way through, a sudden jarring turn in narration and a clanging shift in authorial voice occurs. The reader is propelled into a disquisition of sorts on the fate of the Buckley family two years into the future, when Ireland is reeling under the economic downturn. The abruptness of this break in the narrative destroys the dreamlike quality of the story, and it never quite gets back on track after this. It makes sense that an examination of nostalgia should be counterbalanced with a consideration of the future, but the gracelessness of this section mars what is otherwise a very lovely piece of work.

This is the first book of Deirdre Madden's I've read and I look forward to reading more of her work. Many thanks to Net Galley for granting me permission to read and comment on a digital ARC. (Three and a half stars )

[Bonnie Brody · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fintan Buckley is an attorney, married to Colette, with three children. His sons Rob and Niall are in college and his daughter Lucy is seven years old. Fintan, "hitherto a strong contender for the title of Most Unimaginative Man in Ireland" is facing an existential crisis in his life. He is experiencing hallucinations and "strange shifts of perception" that are worrisome. However, he is also "sensible these days to an immense pathos in life, and finds himself fervently hoping this awareness will never leave him".

This is primarily a book about Fintan and his family. Fintan, though he loves his sons, has always had difficulty connecting with them. His daughter Lucy is the love of his heart and he believes that he loves her more than anyone on earth. His wife Colette is a loving and kind woman and she and Fintan have a good, solid marriage. Fintan's mother, Joan, is a passive aggressive woman who is usually quite unpleasant and critical. She is very hard on Fintan and bullies others with her opinions. Fintan's sister Martina is a beauty who has some dark secrets that keep her emotionally distant from others at time. Martina lives with her aunt Beth, Joan's sister, and their living arrangement works wonderfully. Joan never acted lovingly towards her daughter and Martina, though not estranged from Joan, keeps her distance.

This is a gentle book. It is about Fintan's inner life and the lives of his family members. We watch as Fintan tries to get closer to his son Niall by sharing a love of photography. We are allowed into the hearts of the Buckleys as each chapter focuses on another aspect of the family dynamic.

The novel takes place in Ireland during the economic boom but alludes to The Troubles in the past and fears of economic hardship to come. Fintan and Martina remember The Troubles as children, especially when they visited their grandmother's farm. The main part of the novel takes place during a three month period but the author provides a further landscape that gives the reader a wider view of what happens in the future.

I really loved the experience of reading this novel. It is resting inside me like a soft and gentle memory. I wish I knew the Buckleys. I'd want to sit down and have tea with them and have a good laugh and cry.

[JodiP · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a quiet book, one that you must think about to really gain from. Not much happens, really, but so much is said--about the past, of course, but also how we relate to our families of origin, how becoming parents changes people, and how divorce can impact the parent with less custody. I also really liked, near the end, hwo she tells what happens over the next en years to the family. This reminded me of a good Barbara Pym; it's all about the deftly drawn characters and their interior lives. Another reviewer siad there should be a slow book movement, and that Madden would be a great example of it. That is also a very apt description. It was just what I was looking for at the time, too.

[Lauren F. · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars, if I could. Starts dreamy and intriguing; lags quite a bit in the middle; and then turns into a page-turner at the end, with plenty of moments of true wonder along the way. Deidre Madden has a knack for capturing moments on the page so they feel fresh and familiar at the same time.

This story, of Fintan and his sometimes mysterious family at points major and mundane, plays with time and memory, perspective and perception: What do we know of the past? How might someone else tell it? And how can a single moment change our future trajectory in ways we never could imagine?

[Suzy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a quiet, lovely meditation on life, family, time and how our experience shapes our memory of the past, perceptions about the present and path toward the future. It's told through the lens of middle-aged siblings Finten and Marita Buckley, their family relationships present and past and their life experiences. It's my first Deirdre Madden even though this is her 8th book for adults. I will search out others. Highly recommended.

[Ann · Rating 5 out of 5]

A brilliant little book about nothing and everything; a reflection of time - past, present, and future - as exemplified by the lives of an Irish family.

[Allan · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm not sure why I didn't connect with this book-perhaps I'm not the target audience? :-/

[Eden Thompson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Visit JetBlackDragonfly (The Man Who Read Too Much) at www.edenthompson.ca/blog

Time Present and Time Past is a 2013 novel by Irish writer Dierdre Madden, winner of the Somerset Maugham Award, the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and shortlisted for the Orange Prize. This reminded me of novels I enjoyed by Helen Dunmore, Penelope Fitzgerald, and Susan Hill. Reviewers found this a little masterpiece, beguiling, and ruminative. I found this well written, but simple and without a central event that held me.

We follow middle-aged Fintan Buckley through his daily life at work and at home with his family; Collette, his average wife who is rather timid; Rob his eldest son who is outgoing; a middle son Niall who is a political vegetarian; and Lucy the youngest daughter. Fintan and Collette have a loving relationship with his sister Marina, a fashionable boutique owner, and less so with his critical mother Joan. Fintan's storyline involves discovering old photographs with his son, and researching various early film developing processes. This leads him to musings about the passage of time, and how still images offer a visual portal into the past. Marina lives with her beloved Aunt Beth after an experience she is reluctant to discuss made her suddenly return home from London. Through viewing old photograph the siblings recall their childhood holidays on a farm near Dublin, and return to revisit family there.

There is no building crisis, or denouement resolution that drew me in. This is a novel about a family, where each character gets a featured role, time passes, simple daily life is examined. Well written but I wonder what the author's driving force would be; perhaps it is a personal story.
I wondered why I started it - and - I wondered why I finished it.
Not bad, but not for me.

[Ellen Wong · Rating 3 out of 5]

Feels harsh only giving this book 3 stars because I understood and enjoyed its concept of making you reflect on your life in the past, present and future without dwelling on it too much. It was nice to be made to think about yourself as an individual and on a bigger scale as part of your family. I also really liked the comments about photographs and their power to freeze a moment in time to reflect that exact moment but also to paint a false picture of what life in general was like then. Overall, I did enjoy the book because it makes you evaluate your life in a philosophical sense without harbouring too much regret or pain about how things are different than imagined and it just made me appreciative of my position in life right now. All of that being said however, the reason I’m only giving it 3 stars is just because there was barely a plot line. If you asked me what had happened in the book, i would struggle to think of things and, once I had, it would sound terribly drab because they just do things that would be seen more as filler activities in other books. Definitely a nice concept to a book and would recommend but I suppose it’s a book more to make you think and reflect on yourself than actually read a story (it also vexes me that there was a typo on the blurb).

[Bell · Rating 4 out of 5]

You know the feeling of catching up with an old friend over a cup of coffee, or when you're sitting near a fire place talking with your best friend about their life that you missed out on. Reading this made me feel that way.

It's trivial, it's mundane, but that's what draws you in. The descriptions can be so vivid that you can almost feel the atmosphere of the room the characters are in, the afternoon sun glow on the furnitures. It's really nice.

About the photographs, I really like how this book talks about it. I used to have the exact same thought, you see. The photos we see are black and white but the past was just as colorful as the present. Did the world just suddenly get enveloped in color? Well of course not, but it does seem lovely of an idea. I used to wonder if their voices were as static as they seem to be in old movies, but they're not. They were just as clear as ours today. Blew my mind when I first found out.

Photographs are time capsules. In it time stops, forever unchanging. In the book Fintan said that he doesn't see the point of people taking so many photographs every day, I disagree. When life is so short and brief why not capture as much of it as possible. You might pass on but the snippets of your life will live on.

[Kim · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book just didn't work for me. I think the main problem for me was the extremely distant, almost disinterested, 3rd person perspective. The pov was so remote it felt as if it was written by someone sitting on a cloud idly watching things going on without any real connection or concern for the characters involved. I also felt the 'hallucinations' and 'states of altered consciousness' referred to in the synopsis were poorly executed - in fact if I hadn't been expecting them from the book sleeve I wouldn't have realised that's what they were. A late chapter which then suddenly switches to a discussion of the economic crisis was just bizarre and I couldn't see any reason for it at all. The whole thing felt lazy and incomplete, more like an initial draft that the author hadn't been interested enough to come back and flesh out. I previously read Nothing is Black, and I enjoyed it so much I wanted to read her other novels. But this one just didn't work for me. A disappointment.

[Des Lewis · Rating 5 out of 5]

This Madden book, having been recommended to me out of the blue a few weeks ago, seems highly fortuitous at least! A preternatural phenomenon, perhaps, so in keeping with my experience over the years as generated by gestalt real-time reviewing books of so-called fiction. Some phrases from this chapter thus haunt me even more than they otherwise would have done, viz. “air of the past”, “the quality of time”, “…smiling at the camera in a way that is both beguiling and slightly unnerving”, a woman in one ancient photo when compared to Martina “the resemblance they bear to each other is quite uncanny”, and “It’s a pity it’s in black and white rather than colour”…

The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long or impractical to post here.
Above is one of my observations at the time of the review.

[Karen · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really think this book deserves 3 and a half, maybe more stars but also don't want to mislead... it's sweet, different than novels I usually read. The stated plot, that some of the characters experience different existential crises, isn't really the main part of the book, and while they move thoughtfully and lovingly through life with a subtle awareness of something being different for them, it's not delved into or explored deeply. Still, lovely family, genuine, authentic lives lived and... sweet.

[Hugh Melvin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautifully written book with copious fine details about a middle of the road, middle class extended family. The fact that little happens in the conventional sense of plot does not matter.
What we have instead is an essay on time remembered and half remembered and the viewpoints (told by a narrator) from the family members.
Fintan takes us into his (undramatic) existential crisis and his thoughts throw a perspective on his life. By implication it can be our life as well.

[Nikki · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wondered, idly, as I was reading this pleasant, thoughtful book, if there would be events. It is a wander about Dublin, at first, then a wander about how people think and relate to one another, hold grudges, let them go, realize what they need, and ... very hard to describe. The characters are warm and full, and the authorial voice behind it all is kind and knowing. It will make you feel better, this book, really calm and lovely....

[Paul · Rating 3 out of 5]

Decent enough book about memory weighs on a particular Irish family. Fintan Bucklay is a middle aged businessman that has led a fairly uncomplicated happy life. Perhaps he enjoys eating a tad too much. His mother Joan certainly thinks so and points it out as well as the failings of everyone within earshot. On a visit to his sister Martina, who lives with their aunt, they uncover a family photograph that sends him down a rabbit hole of time flattening hallucinations, but mild ones, not of the Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas variety.

What ensues is a pleasantly tepid survey of the worries of this perfectly lovely, slightly idiosyncratic family. Madden goes for profundity in the end, but it does not jibe with the pace and style that she uses for most of the novel.

More than forgettable but less than memorable.

[Lisa Beaulieu · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely lovely. It's like the last episode of Six Feet Under, made into a novella. It's all going to go away, and it's all ok, and live it while you can, and every now and then, you get a glimpse from the other side of the mystery. Simple and spare and profound. Gives me the shivers in a good way.

[Genevieve Brassard · Rating 4 out of 5]

A deceptively simple but quietly powerful tale of family ties across time, showing how much people keep secret even from their closest and dearest. Also neatly captures a particular time and place (Ireland before the 2008 crash) without overdoing the social or political commentary. Curious to read other Madden titles now.

[Chookychook · Rating 4 out of 5]

A lovely gentle unpretentious book about middle age & families. The characters were real & engaging. I loved the feel of sitting around the fire & having tea with family as I sit sweltering in the tropics. I was intrigued by Christy's home & would have liked to read more- how it was a place of welcome & healing. I shall be looking out for more of Deirdre Maddens books.

[Gabi · Rating 2 out of 5]

Don’t get me wrong, I love a book in which nothing happens. When it’s just the character living their life. It’s great! But this one was a bit lackluster. Truly nothing happened to entertain the nothingness. I was going to give it one star, but the last couple of chapters saved it a bit with the writing.