Ellen Morris is confident, beautiful, bright and educated. Early in 1925, she accepts a teaching post in a rural, misty village. There the young city girl meets two men who will radically transform her. One is the handsome and respected Thomas Kane, a former gunman hero of the Troubles; the other a poor and brutal cottage-dweller, a shadowy and menacing presence. Ellen soons finds that she must conform to the traditions of the local community and toe the rural Irish line, live by the local codes. Beset by violence and turbulent emotion, Ellen rejects the hypocrisy of her religion and plunges into natural instinct, avenging what she sees as the sins of Mother Ireland and Holy Mother Church.
'A conjuror with words ... fascinating.' Nanette Newman, Sunday Express. 'Reads like a blockbuster with a mesage. Delaney's images are powerful.' Times Literary Supplement. 'A cleverly plotted epic ... keeps the reader hanging on until the very last page for the final twist.' Irish Post. 'The suspense is artfully maintained.' Sunday Times
About the Author
Novelist, broadcaster and freelance journalist Frank Delaney was born inTipperary, Ireland. His non-fiction works embrace James Joyce, John Betjeman, Boswell and Johnson, the European Middle Ages and the Celtic civilizations.He has lived in Britain for twenty years, where he broadcasts frequently.
'The Most Eloquent Man in the World', says NPR, about the writer, broadcaster, BBC host and Booker Prize Judge, Frank Delaney. Over a career of interviews that has lasted more than three decades, Delaney, an international-best-selling author himself, has interviewed more than 3,500 of the world's most important writers.
Frank Delaney has earned top prizes and best-seller status in a wide variety of formats, from prolific author, a polished broadcaster on both television and radio, to journalist, correspondent, screenwriter, lecturer, playwright and scholar. He has been the president of the Samuel Johnson Society, president of the UK Book Trust, and the Literary Director of the famed Edinburgh Festival.
A judge of many literary prizes (including the famous Booker), Delaney also created landmark programs and passionate documentaries on many subjects including Joyce, Shaw, Oscar Wilde, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Hemingway, Mailer, Matisse, Van Gogh and the vitality and organic growth of the English language - his famed BBC show on the way we speak, Word of Mouth, is still heard all over the English-speaking world. And his six-part series, The Celts, originally broadcast in forty countries, is still in active DVD distribution, some twenty years after its launch.
Mr. Delaney lectures all over the world, writes every day, and has created a significant podcast series: Re:Joyce, deconstructing, examining and illuminating James Joyce's Ulysses line-by-line, in accessible and entertaining five-minute broadcasts, posted each week on this website. The project is estimated to run a quarter of a century.
Born and raised in County Tipperary, Ireland, Delaney spent more than twenty-five years in England before moving to the United States in 2002. His first 'American' book was the New York Times Bestseller, Ireland. His second, the non-fiction Simple Courage, was chosen as one of the top five books of the year by the American Library Association. Since 2006, he has published five Novels of Ireland, all addressing, decade by decade, the twentieth century history of his homeland. His latest novel, "The Last Storyteller" (Random House, February 7th 2012) celebrates the mysteries of the ancient oral tradition as the last itinerant storytellers work their magic in 1950's Ireland.
Mr. Delaney lives in Litchfield County, Connecticut, with his wife, writer and marketer, Diane Meier.
Delaney broadcasts "Re:Joyce," a weekly podcast on James Joyce's "Ulysses" on his website www.frankdelaney.com. You can find his daily writing tips on Twitter: http://twitter.com/FDbytheword