Description
This is an ambitious and unforgettable story with all the warmth and emotional intensity of James Ryan's first novel, Home From England. Set in the rural Ireland that James Ryan portrays so evocatively, it is the story of five women, looking back to their girlhoods in the faraway world of the 30s, and coming slowly to terms in their own ways with the single traumatic event that forever changed their lives. As war threatened in Europe, life in rural Templeard went on as usual. Flossie, Nora, Margaret, Ber, and the baby Girlie were as close as girls could be, and their life was the nearby convent boarding school and the long summers on their father's farm. Looking back to those moments before tragedy struck, Nora, the girl with the voice of a bird, is at last free.
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Everyone in Templeard had a role to play. Ammie was a beauty, Aunt Cassie had the house to run, Macken the farm. The girls, Flossie, Nora, Margaret, Ber and Girlie were secure in their world: everything as solid as the stones of the house itself, as hopeful as the green fields that stretched to the edge of their horizon. They were the Mackens of Templeard. Nothing, not the events of one terrible autumn day, nor the years of loss that followed, could breach the walls they built around themselves. But the seeds of doubt were growing in the silence surrounding those events, slowly turning their fortress into a prison.From an idyllic beginning, James Ryan weaves a tale of six lives: Flossie, Margaret, Ber, Girlie and Nora, the girl with the voice of a linnet. The sixth life is one they never see, cannot speak of, or listen to, but which grows nonetheless. Probing these lives, and showing how each influenced the others, James Ryan creates a novel of great depth and beauty. The story he tells could be a story of defeated lives, but somehow, told as it is without accusation, it becomes a story of love, power and resilience.
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