Author Description

These are stories of exile and return. The lonely but liberating distance of London, Amsterdam and Paris is compared to the stultifying closeness of Irish family life. In Innocent Bystanders, Helen, who has committed the unforgiveable sin of divorcing and remarrying, returns to Northern Ireland from Amsterdam to see her ageing Catholic mother. At first Helen thinks that Ireland and her mother have changed. A Mills and Boon novel jostles the Rosary beads on a shelf. Her mother watches Dallas and Crossroads on the telly. She is cocooned in a cosy dream-world in a border town whose name is synonymous with terror. But Helen discovers that her mother hasn't changed. She is still the image of Mother Erin, that poor unwilling battered wife with her trials and tribulations, exalted by suffering to a monumental egoism, obsessed to the point of neurosis with the terror of being in the end betrayed by her faithless ungrateful offspring. What was said about Briege Duffaud's first novel, A Wreath upon the Dead: magnificent first novel- times literary supplement it's a corker - London independent it's a triumph - the Times