Author Description

This is the sprawling, richly detailed story of a Irish woman whose life and love are hemmed in on all sides by social prejudice and religious intolerance. Mary O'Neill is born to an already too-large family, disliked and then hated by her father. As she grows up, she clashes again and again with her family and church: for release from a marriage gone bad, for a chance at marrying the man she does love, for the legitimacy of the child she has with him. At last she finds some terms of peace, and whether they mark defeat or triumph is in the eye of the beholder.