Everything Gran told me about Coolanagh was wrong. Quicksand does not suck, it is not bottomless, it does not have a life of its own. It is a phenomenon, not a substance. Any sand can become 'quick' given the right conditions.
It's August in the long, hot summer of 1995. Jo Devereux can't believe it but she hasn't yet returned to San Francisco, though the time for her to have her baby draws near. She's still in her home village of Mucknamore, in her shed on the edge of the ocean, and still resisting Rory, her childhood sweetheart, though her resolve grows weaker by the day.
Jo has spent the first half of the summer writing about her uncle death at the hands of Dan O'Donovan during the Irish Civil War. Now she is exploring Dan's own grisly murder in Mucknamore's notorious sinking sands. What questions this raises for Jo about her beloved Granny Peg. Did she lure Dan out there late at night as an act of revenge? For altogether more intimate reasons?
Or was her grandmother, as Jo needs to believe, innocent of all?
Combing the family letters and diaries for what's gone unsaid as much as what's been written down, Jo wonders about Nora's sudden disappearance from the village at the height of the conflict. What she's not prepared for is the emerging knowledge of how the "War of The Brothers" affected her own life.
Jo urgently needs to understand the price her people had to pay for freedom and what it now means for her and Rory, as he draws ever closer.
BEFORE THE FALL is a sweeping, multigenerational tale set in 1920s and 1990s Ireland and 1980s San Francisco. The second book in Orna's Ross's Irish Civil War trilogy, it's a novel for anyone who ever tried to break free.
Genre: Literary Fiction
It's August in the long, hot summer of 1995. Jo Devereux can't believe it but she hasn't yet returned to San Francisco, though the time for her to have her baby draws near. She's still in her home village of Mucknamore, in her shed on the edge of the ocean, and still resisting Rory, her childhood sweetheart, though her resolve grows weaker by the day.
Jo has spent the first half of the summer writing about her uncle death at the hands of Dan O'Donovan during the Irish Civil War. Now she is exploring Dan's own grisly murder in Mucknamore's notorious sinking sands. What questions this raises for Jo about her beloved Granny Peg. Did she lure Dan out there late at night as an act of revenge? For altogether more intimate reasons?
Or was her grandmother, as Jo needs to believe, innocent of all?
Combing the family letters and diaries for what's gone unsaid as much as what's been written down, Jo wonders about Nora's sudden disappearance from the village at the height of the conflict. What she's not prepared for is the emerging knowledge of how the "War of The Brothers" affected her own life.
Jo urgently needs to understand the price her people had to pay for freedom and what it now means for her and Rory, as he draws ever closer.
BEFORE THE FALL is a sweeping, multigenerational tale set in 1920s and 1990s Ireland and 1980s San Francisco. The second book in Orna's Ross's Irish Civil War trilogy, it's a novel for anyone who ever tried to break free.
Genre: Literary Fiction
Used availability for Orna Ross's Before The Fall