"Exhilarating... one's heart leaps into one's mouth and stays there." (Spectator)
"From the bestselling author of The Secret Scripture, a heartbreaking story of lost love."

"Jack McNulty, a former UN observer, has worked around the world and seen extraordinary things but, as he contemplates his return to Ireland after many years, his memories are dominated by his tumultuous marriage to Mai Kirwan. A great beauty with a vivid mind, Mai was also an elusive and troubled soul, stuck in a perilous marriage."

Purchased as a Birthday Group present for a BCer who has it in her WishList.

Sent this WishList book as a Birthday Group present to a very special BCer.
Happy Birthday, and enjoy! :)

How wonderful to receive this for my birthday - I came across Barry by accident not so long ago and fell in love with his books! Thank you so much!

I would happily read all of Barry's novels, and then read them all over again.

This filled me with so much emotion I sometimes had to stop reading - even in the middle of a paragraph - lay the book down, compose myself, and hardly dare to pick it up again. There is so much heartbreak and despair.

Jack McNulty, in his 50s, living in Accra with his houseboy Tom, realises it is time to return home to Ireland, and writes down his memories, of his childhood and family, his courting of Mai, falling in love, their marriage, their children, his drinking, his gambling, his army career, the war, his travels for the UN, his bridge-building, his close encounters with death.

Time and time again I was swept away by one of his long, breathless sentences, not knowing till I noticed a full stop that it had filled a page or more, filling me with tension as the ship was torpedoed, a bomb dropped, the jeep tumbled down the mountainside...

Some passages I do not want to forget:
In North Africa, when travelling through the desert with his unit of engineers, he comes across a battle scene, the bodies of fallen men, the remains of their tanks.
"All were dead and their nationality was not now of this earth. I had climbed down off the transport to see if I could identify our soldiers, and my living soldiers were watching me from the covered truck, subdued and silent. Now I turned on my heel to go back to them. A lark, a single bird with her dowdy plumage, burst up from her cup of sand just in front of me and like a needle flashing in my mother's hand of old made a long stitch between earth and heaven, with a joyousness that rent my heart."

Remembering an incident in an RAF camp in Yorkshire: "Pat Millane has been on my mind all night. I was drifting in and out of sleep under the mosquito net and in my half-sleep he would be there, chatting and smiling, with his Galway English and his Aran Irish... Old comrades have odd afterlives in their living comrades' hearts. He was anordinary sort of a fella, and yet, extraordinary too, and when that Messerschmitt blew up him and his comrades, and melded them into the blessed aether like a dozen starry angels, it erased a person that was an adornment to the species of man. His army coffin contained mostly sandbags."

In India: "I was making my way along the poorest of roads ner the Ishkuman Pass. It was all geology around me, and not for the first time it occurred to me that the crust of the earth was just a sort of grave for creation."

Argument with Mai (who drank): "When Mai would say quck, unexpected, precious things, sweet nothings indeed, maybe engendered in gin, but priceless to me for all that. For you had to have some currency to keep going in the daylight hours of relative sobriety. But the savagery, the gear of savagery. The subtle metallic click of the machinery, when the rack is brought to the starting point, and the ropes are tied to the body. The terrifying eloquence of the barely articulate drinker. Insults, that might have done as well in the form of a knife, fashioned into a great bludgeon, for fear it would not strike home. Our heads battered by a storm of words, shards of them, rocks of them, blades of them, bullets of them, bombs."

From the back of the book I see Barry has written novels about some of the minor characters: his brother's wife Roseanne in The Secret Scripture, and his long-lost brother Eneas in The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty.

For the time being, I am putting this in my permanent collection as I would like to read it again.

I lent it to Janet and now she has returned it to me. I will put it with my other books by Barry.

Apart from me, this has been read by a friend (and appreciated), and now I have to make some space at home so am leaving it on the shelf in the free library.