Customer Reviews
Profoundly perceptive, stunningly narrated, totally addictive - By: Debbie, 15 Jul 2008 
I have never written a review before & was rubbish at Eng Lit at school but was so moved by this book I had to go online & find out more about the author - & find myself doing this.
I picked up this book because I was in the mood to revisit my childhood holidays in Ireland around the same time. Its somewhat sentimental cover made me hesitate a little. I needn't have feared - the packaging does little to prepare you for what's inside: an overwhelmingly powerful portrayal of an ageing protagonist whose inner contradictions are articulated in stunningly lyrical language. Vulnerable, yet superior. Blind to her own arrogance, yet deeply sensitive to many of her failings. Committed to the pace & harmony of the ancient rural ways she shares with her cousin in their remote & backward smalll-holding. Yet deeply suspicious & judgemental of others in their quiet community. Fundamentallly loving, but profoundly self-absorbed.
I am staggered by the writer's skill in entering the psyche of this self-critical spinster & re-creating both her internal angst & the rhythm of her external world, marked by harsh labour & soft landscapes. I am fascinated to know more of the paralllels with Barry's own experience as a child ... I am hungry to read more of his work, especiallly what it reveals of the pro-English Irish of the early 20th century. I am, in short, an immediate fan!
Timeless and lyrical - By: TeamZissou, 14 Jun 2006 
What stands out from the first page of reading this is the quality of the writing. Lyrical & moving without being overly sentimental, Barry let's the reader become immersed in the life of Annie Dunne, experiencing the hardships & the brief moments of joy with the same rhthym as you imagine her life on the farm being, languid & prosaic. Although it's set in the 1950s you never get any real indication of that time so that it's almost as if time is standing still & only now & again do you get a sense that things are moving on in the "outside world" & that Annie's way of life will become a distant memory but one that still lingers in the shadows & unkept fields of rural Ireland. Great stuff.
A Quaint Little Novel. - By: MaryAnne, 27 May 2005 
A quaint little novel that reads at the slow pace of backwater Ireland.
At first the old Irish use of English presented a barrier, but as I got into the book, the language became a vital part of the whole.
Two elderly cousins living together in a rural village in the late 50's, have the care of a young brother & sister for the summer. Their parents have gone to England in search of work.
We follow the in's & out's of village life for the duration of the season, drawn into the thouights & fears of these elderly women.
It is the depiction of this slow, & at times daunting, way of life, that stayed with me after the last page.
Moments of Beauty - By: P. A. Hogan, 29 Nov 2002 It is the summer of 1960 at Kelsha in rural Wicklow where Annie Dunne, an impoverished & proud spinster who has known better times, lives out her days on a farm owned by her cousin Sarah. Annie’s nephew & his wife leave their young son & daughter in the care of elderly Annie & Sarah while they are in London preparing for their family’s eventual relocation there. Concurrently, Annie’s already shaky sense of security is threatened, testing her mettle to its limits.
There are moments of beauty in this story, bolstered by the fulsomeness of Barry’s writing. Barry justifies his prose: “If you listen carefully for how people are talking to you in Ireland, in certain districts, it is quite elaborate, there is a strangeness to it.”
An interesting aside is that Annie Dunne was a real person: the author’s father’s aunt and, in his boyhood, his “favorite person on God’s earth.” And, like the boy in the story, Barry lived with her at Kelsha one summer in his youth.
