Product Description

Annie Dunne and her cousin Sarah live and work on a small farm in a remote and beautiful part of Wicklow in late 1950s Ireland. All about them the old green roads are being tarred, cars are being purchased, a way of life is about to disappear. Like two old rooks, they hold to their hill in Kelsha, cherishing everything. When Annie's nephew and his wife go to London to find work, their two small children, a little boy and his older sister, are brought down to spend the summer with their great-aunt.

It is a strange chance for happiness for Annie, but against that happiness moves the figure of Billy Kerr, with his ambiguous attentions to Sarah, threatening to drive Annie from her last niche of safety. Suddenly being surrounded by children also proves sometimes darkened and puzzling to her, and she struggles to find clear ground, clear light-to preserve her sense of love and place against these subtle forces of disquiet.

A summer of adventure, pain, delight, and ultimately epiphany unfolds for both the children and their elderly caretakers in this poignant and exquisitely told story of innocence, loss, and reconciliation.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #100873 in Books
• Published on: 2003-04-29
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: .52" h x 5.04" w x 7.96" l, .39 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

From Amazon.com
The central character in Sebastian Barry's novel Annie Dunne is a woman who has been pushed to the margins, a woman whom life has given few chances of happiness and fulfillment. Unmarried, she spends years as housekeeper for her brother-in-law because her sister is too ill to manage. Her sister dies, her brother-in-law remarries, and Annie Dunne is homeless. Invited by her cousin Sarah, she moves to a small farm in a remote part of Wicklow. As the novel opens, the two cousins share their lives and the work on the farm. It is the late 1950s and rural Ireland is changing around them. Annie's nephew heads for London in search of work and leaves his young children with their great-aunt. Content with her life with Sarah, Annie also finds a new capacity for love in her feelings for the two children. Yet even the small pleasures that Annie finds in her life are threatened. An unlikely suitor pays court to Sarah, and Annie's love for the children opens her up to pain almost as much as to happiness. Annie Dunne is a novel in which few external dramas occur--there is an accident with a pony and trap, one of the children goes temporarily missing--but Barry evokes superbly the inner dramas of his characters. In a society where emotions are often severely repressed and expressed only obliquely, small incidents hint at larger feelings and Barry has written a story in which these are subtly and poignantly unfolded. --Nick Rennison, Amazon.co.uk

From Publishers Weekly
Irish playwright and novelist Barry's gift for image and metaphor (The Whereabouts of Aneas McNulty) are equaled here by his eye for descriptive detail. This moving story is narrated by the eponymous Annie Dunne, who, in her 60s, has come to live with her cousin Sarah on an impoverished farm in Kelsha, County Wicklow. Plain and poor, and afflicted with a humpback since a childhood attack of polio, Annie is grateful to Sarah for taking her in. She loves the farm and attacks the backbreaking daily chores with fierce ardor. But when a scheming handyman on a neighboring farm begins to court Sarah, Annie sees her livelihood threatened and fights back with the only weapons in her arsenal: bitterness and rage. Complicating the events of the summer spanned by the plot are the two young children left in Annie's care by her nephew, who's gone off to London. As Annie is terrified to admit, even to herself, the children have their own dark secret, too fearsome to contemplate. Veering between dread, anger and shame, Anne's thoughts are also a mixture of whimsical observations, na‹ve ideas and a poetic appreciation of the natural world. This compassionate portrait of a distraught woman mourning the years of promise and dreams that were "narrowed by the empty hand of possibility" is a masterful feat of characterization, all the more vivid against the backdrop of rural Ireland in the 1950s, undergoing changes that throw Annie's life into sharper focus.
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From Booklist
*Starred Review* SOP for American best-sellers--make the protagonists mostly rich and beautiful, 'cause no one wants to read about the poor and ugly--is crushed by the weight of Irish playwright Barry's utterly hypnotic, small novel. Annie Dunne, crippled in body and spirit, is so poor that only the generosity of her cousin, the once-fair Sarah, keeps her from the workhouse in the late 1950s in rural County Wicklow. Annie helps Sarah keep up the family farm--barely, for the work is almost beyond the two aging women's combined strength. They are what we would now call domestic partners, adapted to one another in the subtle way of long-married people. Although they share a bed, there isn't a hint of sexual impropriety between them. Yet unexpressed desire suffuses their lives, making the small farm a passionately loved place. Barry is especially good at describing the sensuousness of rural life, as when Annie bestows her love on an apple tree as old and gnarled as she; he allows not a whiff of ironic condescension as he reveals the thwarted wildness of that love. When a man, somewhat Sarah's junior and ambitious for land, begins courting Sarah, Annie lives in dread that she might lose her home and her cousin's company. Violence threatens on every page, and the final chapters are breathtaking and driven. Patricia Monaghan
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