There is little light in this gloomy novel and although the prose is on point and the setting minutely rendered, it is difficult to relate to the characters. Harriet Campbell is a resident of a nursing home where she ekes out her days writing about her life in her husband's house 'a great lump of granite... a house bald and bleak as the things that went on in it'. She recalls her childhood and arranged marriage at 16 to a local man twice her age, a morose church Elder, who becomes involved in the Orange Order. The description of those slow days spent tending to their small-holding and her inflexible husband is richly portrayed in tight, lucid prose, but offer little cheer to the reader.

Source: Irish Independent April 01, 2018 21:22 UTC