THE BOY IN THE MOON - Softcover

O’Riordan

3.63

136 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0007292252 ISBN 13: 9780007292257

Publisher: Flamingo, 2008

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An Irish bestseller in hardback, The Boy in the Moon is the new novel from the author of Involved, set in London and contemporary and 1960s rural Ireland.

What happens to a marriage when a husband is responsible for his son’s accidental death? Julia, whose young son Sam died in such circumstances, flees to the West of Ireland in a kind of madness to stay with her father-in-law Jeremiah, a dour, secretive old farmer, still living in a rundown farmhouse. Here, in his silent company, Julia stumbles upon the dark secrets of her husband’s family, and learns, to her greater understanding, how tragedy is passed on from generation to generation.

Strong Irish setting – a superb evocation of rural life in the 1960s.

One of the few female Irish novelists who doesn’t write like Maeve Binchy or Edna O’Brien. O’Riordan writes as powerfully as Dermot Bolger or Colm Toibin, but combines this with a wonderful ability to pin down character and the real mechanisms of human relationships

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Review:

‘The Boy in the Moon confirms O’Riordan’s status as a writer of wit, originality and delicacy who can surprise and delight at every turn.’
Sunday Tribune

‘A pacy, thriller-like plot... the characters are vivid and the observations tartly accurate.’
Irish Times

‘Exquisitely spare in execution, this is a haunting examination of human strength and frailty.’
Time Out

From the Back Cover:

"What perversity would lead a man to court the disaster he most fears, and overrule the instinct to protect his own child? 'The Boy in the Moon' is a relentless opening of wounds which have scarred in childhood and can still twist the body and spirit. When O'Riordan describes the Donovan children with their pitiful longing to please their implacable father, there is a sting in her writing."
HELEN DUNMORE, 'The Times'

"While O'Riordan's eye for the intricacies of a good story is splendid, the real strength of 'The Boy in the Moon' lies in the gradual awakenings and epiphanies of her well-turned characters. She has managed to write a book whose pivotal points are tragedies yet which never descends into the mawkish or glib, showing a mastery of the empathetic. I am already looking forward to her next novel."
LOUISE EAST, 'Irish Times,'

"A real cliff-hanger, the plot so finely spun that critical dissection would be like taking a hurley to a dew-hung Irish gossammer. O'Riordan's Ireland is rather that of the unquiet soul than of 'The Quiet Man'. Exquisitely spare in execution, ' The Boy in the Moon' is a haunting examination of human strength and frailty."
BRIAN DAVIS, 'Time Out,'

"O'Riordan's work is concerned with hidden things, the unsettling secrets of the past that seep into the present. That revelatory quality is evident in all her work, as well as a strain of violence, visceral and disturbingly realistic."
EITHNE FARRY, 'Irish Post'

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