Product Description

At a convent in Ireland at the start of the century, Reverend Mother hears little Anna Murphy recite a poem and feels "a storm break in her hollow heart". This novel explores love, forgiveness, freedom and the nature of religious vocation through the stories of both characters.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #252591 in Books
• Published on: 1995-10-12
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 pages

CLARE BOYLAN
'Exquisitely evokes the harem atmosphere of convent life, the beauty and the silence, the bickering and the cruelties...'

IRISH TIMES
'A wonderful book, a land to be revisited'

About the Author
Kate O'Brien (1897-1974) lived in London and also in Spain, where she developed a passionate and enduring love of Spanish literature and culture. One of this century's greatest novelists, her fiction broke new ground in Irish writing by focusing on the prosperous Catholic bourgeoisie and by giving central importance to women's struggle for selfhood in a rigidly sex-stereotyped society.

Customer Reviews

For those who enjoy something a little out of the ordinary
This story, about the relationship between a Reverend Mother and one of her charges at an Irish convent school, is a sensitive look at the life of the two cental characters and the struggles and hardships they endure. The parallel between the life of Anna and her Reverend Mother and their endurance against the different forms of adversity they each face is drawn beautifully and the characters are fully fleshed out and three dimensional.

This is a novel for those who enjoy a story that traces events in peoples' lives and a story that details how each and every one of us can have a profound effect on others. Both Anna and the Reverend Mother are healed by their relationship with each other and are helped to come to terms with difficult and tragic episodes in their lives.

One of the major messages for the reader is the effect we have on the lives of those around us and what we can do to ease others' pain and help them on their journey through life.

Truly inspirational!

It's about nuns, but bizarrely, it's still excellent!
This book surprised me and delighted me. I came to it expecting difficulty and boredom as it was a novel to be read for an english literature degree. I could not have been more pleased. Everything about it suggested that it would be dry, stiff and dull. On the contrary, it was beautifully observed, and genuinely interesting.

It delved inside the private lives of a high ranking nun and her young charge in surprising sympathetic manner. The novel particulary interested me as I am a past pupil of the school in which the novel is based. It's amazing how the novel communivates the teaching of the school, even today.

But this does not colour my opinion of its merit. Those who are completely independent of county Limerick enjoy its insights into the machinations of an Irish convent and its foreign leader.

This writer is a sad absentee from the canon of Irish literature. In many critical studies she has been compared to a female Joyce especially in this novel, and the opus of her works, The Last of Summer.

5 stars