After the Rising: A Sweeping Saga of Love, Loss and Redemption - The Centenary Edition

An epic biography of figures famous and familiar woven into an autobiography of a mother written with "corrective" footnotes added by a disrespectful daughter. Wonderful in its reality, A Dance in Time is chock full of characters you'll love and some you'll hate but not a single one who is not vibrant and alive. But [then] Dolores dies.

This is a really riveting story spanning the years from the end of the Irish War of Independence in 1922 to the mid-1990s, via London and San Francisco. It has lots of different strands and storylines that are tied together in a very satisfying way. Two families on opposite sides of a political divide are separated as much by murky familial and love entanglements as the ostensible reasons that make them enemies. The public reason that the Devereux and the O'Donovan families are against each other is that they take opposite sides in the Irish Civil War of 1922/3. The Devereux family work and suffer for the Republican cause; the O'Donovans benefit by being pro-Treaty. But "Lovers' Hollow" is much much more than a story of a war-divided community. The narrator is Jo Devereaux, the grandchild of one of the pro-Treaty Devereuxs, who now, at the age of 38 (in 1995) and expecting her first child, researches the papers about the Civil War time left to her by her dead mother. When she was younger, the boy she loved was forbidden to her (she being a Devereux and he an O'Donovan) but they fell in love anyway, with disasterous consequences for her. Now she is back in the small village where they grew up and where he still lives, now with his wife and two children. She settles into a rundown shed to research the papers and uncover the story of what truly happened in the 1920s, while he visits her and they talk about old times and their feelings for each other rekindle. In this way the author draws together four generations of women and scenes as far apart as Wexford, London and San Francisco. it's a unique story that puts the women at the centre of a conflict long known in Irleand as 'The War of the Brothers', but if that makes you think the women are stereotypically the goodies and the men the baddies, you're wrong. All the characters are real, brought vividly to life, and all have good and bad in them. Through this story of murder, mystery and madness, we learn a lot about Ireland, about the meaning of war, and about human nature. As the narrator slowly comes to a true understanding of love and freedom, so do we. I loved this book and found it hard to believe it was a first novel. The author is a born storyteller. Brilliant!