Patrick Devaney – författare

Major Coote has recently moved his somewhat reluctant family from their comfortable London home to a run-down Irish demesne in pursuit of his grandiose farming dreams. His neighbors, the OConnors, are struggling with the problems of raising a large, strong-willed brood. Relations between the two families become strained when the OConnors acquire the Grey Knight, a Jack B. Yeats painting which Major Coote believes to have been stolen from his mansion. Then seventeen-year-old Hugh OConnor meets Hazel, the Majors beautiful fifteen-year-old daughter, and trouble mounts, with unforeseen tragic consequences. Set in Connacht in 1981, a time of rising tensions and sporadic violence brought about by the Northern Ireland hunger strikes, this novel delineates the fragility and wonder of first love.

Trinity student Charles Stanihurst, the son of a Dublin merchant and a Roscommon chambermaid, flees his native city after assaulting an English officer and heads for the West of Ireland, where he encounters a culture virtually unknown within the pale. Beyond the Shannon much of the old Gaelic way of life is still intact, though under growing threat from the political power and land greed of the ‘foreigners’. Charles is forced to confront divisions between his Anglo-Irish and Gaelic loyalties, while seeking his spiritual father, Bishop William Bedell, who is translating the Old Testament into Irish. Set in post-Flight of the Earls, pre-Cromwellian Ireland of 1641, this novel tells the gripping story of a struggle between two opposing cultures that set the scene for the rebellion sealing the fate of Gaelic Ireland.