Named a Most Anticipated Book of the Year by Time , The Millions , and Literary Hub A magnificent novel. Sally Rooney An incandescent novel from one of our greatest living novelists The Times about the inheritance of trauma, wonder, and love across three generations of women. Nell McDaragh never knew her grandfather, the celebrated Irish poet Phil McDaragh. But his love poems seem to speak directly to her. Restless and wryly self-assured, at twenty-two Nell leaves her mother Carmel s orderly home to find her own voice as a writer mostly online, ghost-blogging for an influencer and to live a poetical life. As she chases obsessive love, damage, and transcendence, in Dublin and beyond, her grandfather s poetry seems to guide her home. Nell s mother, Carmel McDaragh, knows the magic of her Daddo's poetry too well the kind of magic that makes women in their nighties slip outside for a kiss and then elope, as her mother Terry had done. In his poems to Carmel, Phil envisions his daughter as a bright-eyed wren ascending in escape from his hand. But it is Phil who departs, abandoning his wife and two young daughters. Carmel struggles to reconcile the poet with the father whose desertion scars her life, along with that of her fiercely dutiful sister and their gentle, cancer-ridden mother. To distance herself from this betrayal, Carmel.
