Time Present and Time Past

This Orange Prize Finalist novel is both a meditation on time and memory and “a deeply moving portrait of domestic and family life” in Ireland (The Sunday Telegraph).  Ireland, 2006. The economic miracle known as the Celtic Tiger has swept the country into a euphoria of wealth and transformation. But for forty-seven-year-old Dubliner Fintan Buckley, the race toward progress is also a troubling purge of the past. His young daughter, Lucy, and teenage son, Niall, are growing up in an Ireland that is changing as fast as they are.   More and more, Fintan feels the rush of time “like a kind of unholy wind”—so much so that he begins to experience strange, dreamlike visions. Is that his own face he sees on another man? Is that his sister staring back at him from a late-Victorian photograph?   A resonant portrait of a middle-class family in pre-crash Ireland, Deirdre Madden’s latest novel “is a reminder that we’d do best . . . to savor what we can of those passing moments Eliot called the ‘still point of the turning world’” (The New York Times Sunday Book Review).  “An outstanding book.” —Irish Independent