Mary > Recent Status Updates

Theo has bestowed his first gift to St Minette.

A tad annoying that the author thinks 60-year old Vera is an ‘old woman’! 🤣

‘I am glad of my victory, not of the victory itself, but for the fact that the world has been shown that Ireland has a flag, that Ireland has a national anthem, and in fact we have a nationality’ - Pat O’Callaghan, Olympic Gold Medallist in hammer-throwing, 1928 Games in Amsterdam.

Hooked by all three story threads in this book. Not sure how they will resolve or knit together, but feel I should warn readers that there are disturbing sexual abuse scenes in one of the three - it ain’t no Little House on the Prairie rose-tinted specs version of the days of yore!

Hooked by all three story threads in this book. Not sure how they will resolve or knit together, but feel I should warn readers that there are disturbing sexual abuse scenes in one of the three—it ain’t no Little House on the Prairie rose-tinted specs version of the days of yore!

<spoiler>One of the story threads includes a depiction of graphic sexual abuse.</spoiler>

On loss and grief - ‘it is the unarguable force of their absence, and the conundrum of what to do with what they leave behind: the boots, the combs full of strands, the spoon worn smooth by their fingers, the shawl draped on a chair, the bonnet on the peg.’
Less is so much more!

Arriving on foot at the ‘House of Formation’ Liam observes a group of young men playing hurling.
There is something forbiddingly moneyed about them: they have the patina of wealth about them; expensive schooling. They are not, Liam is sure, from the country, like he is. Not one of them wears a pair of strong, mud-heavy boots.

This house is a thing both ancient and disjointed, an entity of addition and subtraction, a palimpsest of stone and wood and caulk and mud.

2022 and the past becomes even darker. Two more revelations, a rape and a murder, rock Gisele. She engages two new lawyers to represent her rather than the female who she feels is sensationalising the case anew.