History is everywhere. It seeps into the soil, the sub-soil. Like rain, or hail, or snow, or blood.

Josie O’Grady is an elderly woman, living alone in her dilapidated big house on the outskirts of a rural Irish village. Then one day her bedroom door swings open to reveal McGreevy, an IRA terrorist on a bloody crusade, who has chosen her isolated house for sanctuary. As days pass, these two outsiders develop a grudging respect for each other, which grows into affection and friendship, but the police net is closing in and, with dawning horror, Josie starts to suspect that McGreevy is not only using her house as a refuge.

Based on interviews with the IRA leader Dominic McGlinchy in Portlaoise Prison and published four years before the Good Friday Agreement, this thrilling, political, poetic novel is a portrait of the state of the Irish nation at the height of the Troubles.

Author Biography

Edna O’Brien wrote more than twenty celebrated works of fiction, including her classic The Country Girls trilogy, as well as plays and four works of non-fiction, which have been translated into over thirty languages. Her final novel Girl was awarded the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year in 2020. She was the recipient of many honours, including the Irish PEN Lifetime Achievement Award, the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, the PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature, and the David Cohen Prize for Literature, as well as being appointed an honorary Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2017. In 2021, O’Brien was also named Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Born and raised in the west of Ireland, she lived in London for many years before her death in July 2024.

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