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The
2003 Award
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My Dream of You by Nuala O'Faolain
Nominated by:
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Publisher of Nominated Edition: Riverhead Books ISBN 1573221775 |
| the complete A-Z listing of nominated authors. |
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ABOUT
THE BOOK
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| Kathleen
de Burca is a travel writer based in London. The office is the nearest thing
she has to a home, and her colleagues to friends and a family. And then
a quick series of blows strips away the props of her life, revealing the
painful cost of her refugee existence, and she is faced with the frightening
imperative of change. In her crisis she turns to a new kind of writing, and decides to investigate a story about a relationship so passionate that it burned its way across the barriers of class and culture, a true story she has long known in fragments - the scandalous affair between the wife of an English landlord and an Irish servant in Ireland in the 1850s, years marked by the devastation of the potato famine. After an absence of thirty years, Kathleen returns to Ireland to research the story of the lovers and begins a journey that leads her not only into the historical past, but also into a reconsideration of the family she fled years ago. During her time in the country, she meets a lover of her own who presents her with a choice that promises to alter the course of her life. As she moves toward her decision she calls on the strengths of her identity as a woman, an Irish woman, and a woman who is no longer young. And meanwhile, she brings the story of the long-ago lovers to a dénouement as tender as it is tragic. My Dream of You explores the extremes of passion, the depths of loneliness, and the resilience of the human heart. |
| ABOUT THE AUTHOR |
| Nuala O'Faolain is a columnist with The Irish Times and the author of Are You Somebody? The Accidental Memoir of a Dublin Woman. She lives in Dublin and County Clare. My Dream of You is her first novel. |
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Reader
Review
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Having read "Are You Somebody", I approached "My Dream of You" with some reluctance fearing too many echoes from the first book. And there are echoes which to my mind weaken it. Kathleen de Burca, the middle-aged heroine, in something of a mid-life crisis, returns to Ireland after thirty years, with the idea of writing a novel based on a famous 19th century Irish divorce case. She travels to Ballygall, a town somewhere in the north west to research the project and from there the various threads of the novel spread out. Ballygall is the best part of the novel - the rundown hotel and the local characters, particularly the elderly librarian Nan Leach, have an authentic feel. Her flashbacks to her London life are also interesting. But when we are presented with the maudlin self-pity of her Irish childhood added to, for me at any rate, the grotesque passionate affair with the more than middle-aged son of the soil I wanted to put down the book and leave it there. What drives the story on is the speculation on the Victorian divorce case, - was it a story of adulterous passion, or, of an unwanted wife being set up. The various strands are woven together with some style and Nuala O'Faolain is a writer of some considerable talent. For me to would have been a much better book without the family reminiscences and the lover Shay. Raheny Library Readers' Group Member |
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