Wild Decembers
From the award-winning author of The Country Girl Trilogy comes a tale of tragic love and feuding neighbors set in rural Ireland.
To Joseph Brennan, the fields of Cloontha “mean more than fields, more than life and more than death, too.” The desolate mountain in western Ireland is where his family has always lived, and where he and his younger sister Breene continue to farm the family land. But their meager lives, and Cloontha itself, will change forever when Michael Bulger arrives from Australia to claim the neighboring farm. Though he is greeted with kindness, the community soon grows suspicious of the returned exile. And while Joseph’s bitterness turns to a one-sided rivalry with Michael, Breene’s love for the man grows even stronger.
With both humor and melancholy, Edna O’Brien weaves poetic insight and mythic power into this downtrodden story of love and hate that is “Irish to the quick . . . and, in a strange way, beautiful” (TheWashington Post).
“Readers could not ask for a more profoundly satisfying book.” —Boston Herald
To Joseph Brennan, the fields of Cloontha “mean more than fields, more than life and more than death, too.” The desolate mountain in western Ireland is where his family has always lived, and where he and his younger sister Breene continue to farm the family land. But their meager lives, and Cloontha itself, will change forever when Michael Bulger arrives from Australia to claim the neighboring farm. Though he is greeted with kindness, the community soon grows suspicious of the returned exile. And while Joseph’s bitterness turns to a one-sided rivalry with Michael, Breene’s love for the man grows even stronger.
With both humor and melancholy, Edna O’Brien weaves poetic insight and mythic power into this downtrodden story of love and hate that is “Irish to the quick . . . and, in a strange way, beautiful” (TheWashington Post).
“Readers could not ask for a more profoundly satisfying book.” —Boston Herald
