Description

“My wooing started in enthusiasm, was described by assault and circumscribed by land; each one of these components shaped my soul.” Therefore writes Charles O’Brien, the memorable idol of best-selling writer Joe Delaney’s remarkable fresh novel–a significant epic of infatuation, serious commitment, and persuasive background concerning a violent period that will form contemporary Ireland. Born right into a respectable Irish-Anglo household in 1860, Charles enjoys his native land and its long-suffering but irrepressible people. As a healer, he moves the country dispensing conventional remedies while taking in tales and tales of past times–and seeing the painful, frequently chaotic delivery of land-reform actions meant to result in Irish independence.At age forty, summoned to Paris to deal with his desperate countryman–the notorious Oscar Wilde–Charles encounters the fateful time of his existence. In an opportunity encounter with an attractive and established young Englishwoman, eighteen-year-old May Burke, he's passionately and immediately smitten–but callously declined. Vowing to enhance herself, Charles returns to Ireland, where he undertakes the upkeep of the truly amazing and forgotten property of Tipperary, in whose shadow he's lived his entire life–and which, he finds, might fit in with her dad and April.