 |
|
 |
Dance Lessons
A Novel
Áine Greaney
Paper $19.95
| 978-0-8156-0984-1
| 2011
"Greaney’s second novel (after The Big House) depicts grief with trust in the reader’s empathy. The author is able to capture emotional nuance with minimal flourish; her characters emerge as strong individuals confronting unexpected pain."—Publishers Weekly
|
|
 |
|
|
Born and raised in County Mayo, Áine Greaney is a writer and editor
living on Boston’s North Shore. She is the author of the novel The Big House
and the short story collection The Sheep Breeders Dance. In addition, she
has written several award-winning short stories and numerous feature articles
for the Irish Independent, the Irish Voice, Creative Nonfiction, and the Literary Review, among others.
|
A year after her husband’s death in a sailing accident off Martha’s
Vineyard, Ellen Boisvert bumps into an old friend. In this chance encounter,
she discovers that her immigrant husband of almost fifteen years was
not an orphan after all. Instead, his aged mother Jo is alive and residing
on the family’s isolated farm in the west of Ireland.
Faced with news of her mother-in-law incarnate, the thirty-nine-year-old
American prep school teacher decides to travel to Ireland to investigate
the truth about her husband Fintan and why he kept his family’s
existence a secret for so many years.
Between Jo’s hilltop farm and the lakeside village of Gowna, Ellen
begins to uncover the mysteries of her Irish husband’s past and the cruelties
and isolation of his rural childhood. Ellen also stumbles upon Fintan’s
long-ago romance with a local village woman, with whom he had a
daughter, Cat. Cat is now fourteen and living with her mother in London.
As Ellen reconciles her troubled relationship with Fintan, she discovers a
way to heal the wounds of the past.
Deeply rooted in the Irish landscape and sensibility, Dance Lessons is
a powerful story of loss, regret, and transformation.
View other books on Irish Studies
www.ainegreaney.com/
6 x 9, 232 pages
|
|
|
