About This Book
On a hill overlooking the grey sea, in a house filled with the past, a woman gathers her ghosts for one night to hear their story retold.
Born into the grotesque bustle of mid-twentieth century London she is drawn by her mother's past back to wild, coastal countryside in Ireland. Her own heritage is partly this and partly mystery which will never be solved.
She has loved deeply and lives alone. On the night of her beloved only son's departure from a house where she is to be left waiting for the unknown future, she tells the story of her life as it has been. She has cared and lost. That is her strength. She survives through her knowing and those who knew her.
Told in the tradition of the household bard, the folklore stream Irish people are imbued with, she invokes the lost souls, who were her companions up to this, who found each other to form a life apart, and sustained each other. This story does not shrink back from harsh contemporary realities, but the mythic element is the presence of the otherworldly, sustaining and informing the creatures of the margin, who see more than most eyes see.
Sive asks each one to be remembered and to live again through her story, to absolve her grief and feel her love, to inform her resolve, on a single night, on the edge of the future to come.
