Annie Dunne

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I invariably end up going back to authors who simply know how to tell a good story without being too showy. They're the smartest kids in their class, and they forge an intimacy when Connell picks his mother up from Marianne's house.

Fortunately she is taken in by her spinster relative, Sarah Cullen, who is two years older and needs help in running a poor farm in Wicklow, Ireland, in 1959. When they both move to Dublin for Trinity College, their positions are swapped: Marianne now seems electric and in-demand while Connell feels adrift in this unfamiliar environment.Before living with Sarah, Annie lived with her sister, Maud, her brother-in-law, Matt, and their three boys, including one named Trevor. I thought "A Long Long Way" should have won the BOoker Prize a few years ago -- it was shortlisted but I thought it was better than the novel that won. All about them the old green roads are being tarred cars are being purchased a way of life is about to disappear. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and an Honorary Fellow of Trinity College, Dublin.

Perhaps the existence of a new and more prosperous Ireland, or the fast evolution in the rural area where I live, made me feel less compelled by the change of dirt roads being paved. This reads like a poetic love letter to Ireland, to all the men and women, like Annie, left behind by a changing world, the difficulties of accepting that life is a work in progress, always changing. The book describes the events of the summer as Annie delights in playing the role of a mother, but also feels threatened by the prospect of her cousin marrying a local farmhand, thus leaving her homeless once again.The eponymous protagonist is an unmarried woman in her sixties who lives with her similarly solitary cousin Sarah in a Wicklow farmhouse. I do love books where nothing seems to be happening and yet so much does (rather like with Jennifer Johnston who you kindly introduced me to) so if I can find this at the library I will have to give it a whirl. The marriage coverlet is woven and embroidered for the happy pair, the house is built in a few summer weeks by the meitheal of neighbours, the last twist and stitch is put to the thatch, and in they go, the fortunate couple, with strength and purpose – and at length the house is desolate and empty with only rain for a roof, the stranger comes and opens the rotted hope chest, and puts their fingers to the folded coverlet, which falls from their hand in mouldy fragments. That makes it suffused with melancholy as she contemplates past disappointments and the fragility of her position.

He had two consecutive novels shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, A Long Long Way (2005) and the top ten bestseller The Secret Scripture (2008), and has also won the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Prize, the Irish Book Awards Novel of the Year, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and others. Annie Dunne and her cousin Sarah live ands work on a small farm in a remote and beautiful part of Wicklow in late 1950s Ireland. Can Annie manage the children, quell her own fears, doubts, and surfacing anger—and also survive the vile taunts that Billy Kerr throws at her secretly for her privileged family past. Life has become a routine of hard work, on the farm and in the home, but at the end of each day they are satisfied with the life they have, and are glad to have one another.

For reasons I can't explain, and despite a character with an Irish anger I recognize from relatives (and admittedly sometimes myself), the story didn't grab me.