The Promise [Hardcover]

Mary Ryan (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 1, 1999

Enjoying his student days in Florence, Colm befriends Robin, a rootless American girl. In the intense embrace of youth they build a strength that helps them face the horror of their pasts. Before the emotional parting, they promise to meet again in Florence on Colm's fiftieth birthday.

In the autumn of 1996 Colm returns to Florence, nursing a failed marriage, burdened with the recall of events he wants to forget, and half remembering the promise of a tryst made twenty-eight years earlier.

This time, in the heat and shade of Florence, darker memories will stir. A mature man will see the city and its citizens--particularly Paola, his calm and alluring landlady and her studious, ailing son--with a different and more sensitive eye. His is a journey of self-discovery, love and absolution.

In The Promise, Mary Ryan once again delivers the moving, emotionally charged story that her fans have come to expect.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

From a bestselling author in Ireland, this romantic novel portrays the midlife spiritual crisis of a repressed, divorced stockbroker yearning for his lost youth. After Colm Nugent's long-suffering wife accuses him of being "cold" and leaves him after 21 years of marriage, just shy of his 50th birthday, he dreams about Robin McKay, a feisty American with whom he fell in love while backpacking though Italy in 1968. Recovering from a mild coronary, Colm embarks on a nostalgic holiday to Italy to reencounter the life that once held such promise, and perhaps to find the lost Robin. He enrolls in a language course and takes up residence with teacher Paola Nosterini, a beautiful, soulful widow and mother of an ailing child, who, coincidentally, shares a past with Colm. Ryan braids the narrative of Colm's return to Italy in search of absolution with flashbacks to his harrowing experience as a young student sexually abused by a pedophiliac priest and the wondrous summer of love spent in Florence with Robin, who has her own burdensome secrets. Burrowing deep into blocked memories, Colm faces his guilt over having left Robin in a Florentine hospital, never knowing whether she lived or died. They had promised to meet again in Florence on their shared birthdays the year he turned 50Aand now he hopes to fulfill his pledge. Ryan (Glenallen) evokes youthful love and midlife crisis with workaday, sometimes florid prose. As she gradually reveals details in flashback, however, the story acquires complexity and depth. The coincidental events in the denouement demand the reader's indulgence, but Paola sums up the novel's weepy lesson: "Everything that happens is eternal and is thrown up again, sooner or later... like the small stones in the sea." (July)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews

A novel of memory and regret from Irish author Ryan (Mask of the Night, 1997; etc.). Colm Nugent is a wealthy Dublin stockbroker whose market is more likely to be found in the pages of The Financial Times than in the village square of Tralee, but he grew up tending cattle in Roscommon all the same. A bright boy whose many illnesses allowed him to devote almost his entire childhood to books and study, Colm won a scholarship to a local boarding school and had grand ambitions from an early age. They were largely fulfilled, but now, in middle age, hes reached a dead end. His son Alan was killed in a cycling accident some years ago; his wife Sherry has just left him for another man; and Colm himself has had a mild heart attack that leaves him wondering what the point of his life has been. As is usual in such moments, his thoughts go back to first lovein his case, meaning Italy, which he first visited as a 22-year-old in the summer of 1968. There, he met Robin McKay, an 18-year-old American also on her first trip abroad. Wild, impetuous, and more than slightly unstable, Robin becomes Colms partner and guide as he discovers the glories of art, history, foodand sex. Although he loses contact with Robin after returning home, he never forgets her, and he recalls that they had made a half-serious vow to meet in Florence in 1996 for Colms 50th birthday. Italys as good a place to recuperate as anywhere else, so Colm goes back after 28 years. Will he rediscover Robin? Or will he finally find himself? Theres a lot of history south of the Alps, after all, and not all of it has to do with the Caesars. Soap opera with good local color (both Italian and Irish): a story that will be convincing only to someone who wants a good cry and doesnt need much prodding. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 279 pages
• Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books; 1st edition (July 1, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312205716
• ISBN-13: 978-0312205713
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,577,246 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Mystical Love, May 20, 2009

By 

Davis Aujourd'hui (Upstate NY, United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Promise (Hardcover)

If you enjoy a sentimental romance such as I do, you will love this tale. The promise that is made between the two lovers will keep you in suspense until the end. In between, you will travel from Ireland to the mystical city of Venice. The imagery painted by the author will delight you. You will feel as if you are there.

To me, any love story is a spiritual story. I especially appreciated that since I am the author of a spiritually-themed novel entitled "The Misadventures of Sister Mary Olga Fortitude." This author swept me off my feet and transported my soul.

Davis Aujourd'hui, author

4.0 out of 5 stars The Promise: a fast paced and worthwhile effort, April 17, 2009

By 

Byrne Hourihane "reporterbth" (Phoenix, Az. USA.) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Promise (Hardcover)

No one describes the Irish landscape like an Irish author. Mary Ryan, the Dublin-based lawyer cum writer has this to say about the childhood farm of Colm Nugent, The Promise's nut character: "The flat countryside has only enough intermittent rise in it to save it from being a plain.... On summer days the sunlight would move from one side of the barnyard to the other and flit across the fields; at harvest the breeze would carry the scent of new-mown hay."

It's fair to say that Ryan also draws out sights, smells and sounds of Florence, Italy, and culls enough conversational Italian in the effort to ensure that readers knows she has spent time there. Much time. And in Paris she navigates the Left Bank with ease as a tormented Colm Nugent seeks resolution to problems endemic to the Irish culture. For Nugent cannot rid himself of a painful past long enough to enjoy the present and anticipate a bright future, which always seems just out of reach. In his melancholy youth lurks memory of a pedophile Irish priest who caused him mental and physical pain while Colm boarded at a diocesan school, Clonarty College. And there was his wife Sherry, who abandoned him with impunity for another man after they struggled for years to overcome the loss of their only child, Alan, to a horrible accident. His father, Tom Nugent, held special disdain for Colm, who as a child was often too ill to help with farm chores. And when Colm's mother Maura died of cancer, Tom Nugent blamed him, announcing to the family that Colm's dismissal from the diocesan school precipitated her illness. Small wonder that Colm's siblings turned against him at this point, furthering his descent into despair. Catherine Clohessy, Kattie, Colm's first love, tired of waiting for him to achieve a semblance of manhood and married another.

By this point in the book we want to shout at Colm what we learned reading those self-help books in the 1980s and 1990s. He must forgive others their trespasses before he can forgive his own. Or, is it the other way around? Anyway, before we can stop him he is back in Florence to rekindle an affair he had with an American-Irishwoman, Robin McKay, in 1968. The fact that this Robin might've dropped a few feathers in the past thirty years is of little importance to a man who has already lost his own zest for life.

In the closing chapter he miraculously finds Robin and grants everyone mass absolution. As readers, we're relieved.

The Promise's excellent characterizations and use of local vernacular are its strength. I don't know if a movie deal is in the offing, but the book shows, well, promise.

5.0 out of 5 stars Unexpected Hit, February 22, 2000

By 

Beau Thurnauer "Beau" (Coventry, CT USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Promise (Hardcover)

I'm not sure why this book is not more well known and why it is not more widely reviewed.

I am not a big romantic reader nor do I have a life full of mysterious lovers. But something about this novel grasped me like few others have.

Main character Colm is nothing special nor are the women he meets. Yet we all have had incidents in our past that we wonder about. If a few details had been a little bit different would our life have been different? If we ran into our first love would they throw their arms around us or say "sorry I don't remember you?"

This book captured me. It is easy to read, moves right along and the story line is plausible. Predictable perhaps but that does not detract from the book. The detailed descriptions of the feelings and emotions of the participants is wonderful.

I thoroughly enjoyed this story. It is far better than many of the mass market books I read daily and better than most of Oprah's picks.