Annie Dunne (ISBN 0670031127)

Amazon.com Review:
The central character in Sebastian Barry's novel Annie Dunne is a woman who has been pushed to the margins, a woman whom life has given few chances of happiness and fulfillment. Unmarried, she spends years as housekeeper for her brother-in-law because her sister is too ill to manage. Her sister dies, her brother-in-law remarries, and Annie Dunne is homeless. Invited by her cousin Sarah, she moves to a small farm in a remote part of Wicklow. As the novel opens, the two cousins share their lives and the work on the farm. It is the late 1950s and rural Ireland is changing around them. Annie's nephew heads for London in search of work and leaves his young children with their great-aunt. Content with her life with Sarah, Annie also finds a new capacity for love in her feelings for the two children. Yet even the small pleasures that Annie finds in her life are threatened. An unlikely suitor pays court to Sarah, and Annie's love for the children opens her up to pain almost as much as to happiness. Annie Dunne is a novel in which few external dramas occur--there is an accident with a pony and trap, one of the children goes temporarily missing--but Barry evokes superbly the inner dramas of his characters. In a society where emotions are often severely repressed and expressed only obliquely, small incidents hint at larger feelings and Barry has written a story in which these are subtly and poignantly unfolded. --Nick Rennison, Amazon.co.uk

MOVING AND CAPTIVATING:
Sebastian Barry's second novel gives the reader a look at life in rural Ireland in the late 1950s from `ground level' - through the eyes of a woman in her early 60s who has returned from Dublin after middle age to live out her life on her cousin Sarah's farm. Annie and Sarah are spinsters - but while they wonder, and honestly lament, from time to time their lot in life, they are reasonably satisfied with their station. They live together in a small farmhouse with no electricity, no running water, no indoor plumbing. They are honest, good-hearted people - but not without their faults and quirks (which loom larger in their own eyes than in the eyes of others). One summer, Annie's nephew - who is in the process of relocating his family to London - drops off his son (4) and daughter (6) to stay with Annie and Sarah for the summer. The presence of the two children is both a joy and an awful responsibility to the two older women - and over the course of their stay, their addition to the household, along with other events, cause Annie to doubt the stability of her own future with Sarah. Barry's characters are all very well-developed - each of them veritably leaps off the page into the mind of the reader. Told from Annie's perspective - and making the reader privy to her very thoughts - the story unfolds with many emotional and psychological, as well as social, aspects. The tale marches along at a leisurely pace, picking up steam (as it should) near the end. The language Barry employs is a gift - a rare glimpse (for those of us who have never been blessed to travel to Ireland) into the lives of these women and their neighbors. This novel is a remarkable testament to the resilience of the human spirit, the ties of family and neighbors, and the healing power of even the simplest form of love and acceptance.

Powerful, Evocative Novel:
I started reading this book with great trepidation, because I knew that I would probably compare it unfavorably, and unfairly, to Pat Barker's wonderful World War I trilogy (Regeneration, The Eye in the Door, and The Ghost Road. (The Ghost Road won the Booker in 1995.) But The Long Long Way Home has merits of its own: most notably, its potent, elegant writing. I found that I reacted to this novel on two levels. Intellectually, it's nowhere near the quality of Pat Barker's trilogy. It's not as ambitious, of course, and in all fairness, it's one book rather than three. But as I read, I found myself asking, "So what? What is fresh here? What am I looking at differently?" The book didn't seem to have anything to say that any other World War I novel--any other war novel--hadn't already said. But how beautifully it said it. Barry is truly a master of style. I found myself rereading passages simply to better appreciate the way in which they were written--a rarity for me. I was stunned by how powerfully the final pages affected me, even though I knew what would happen, even though I had decided that the book had nothing to say, even though I was surrounded by four children begging me to help them find their shoes and mix them chocolate milk. In fact, to my great surprise, Willie Dunne will haunt my imagination for a long time. This may not be the great World War I novel, as Barker's trilogy was. But because of the lovely, evocative writing and the meticulously conceived character of Willie Dunne, it is a great novel, or at least a very good one.

Moments of Beauty:
It is the summer of 1960 at Kelsha in rural Wicklow where Annie Dunne, an impoverished and proud spinster who has known better times, lives out her days on a farm owned by her cousin Sarah. Annie's nephew and his wife leave their young son and daughter in the care of the elderly Annie and Sarah while they are in London preparing for their family's eventual relocation there. Concurrently, Annie's already shaky sense of security is threatened, testing her mettle to its limits. There are moments of beauty in this story, bolstered by the fulsomeness of Barry's writing. Barry justifies his prose: "If you listen carefully for how people are talking to you in Ireland, in certain districts, it is quite elaborate, there is a strangeness to it." An interesting aside is that Annie Dunne was a real person: the author's father's aunt and, in his boyhood, his "favorite person on God's earth." And, like the boy in the story, Barry lived with her at Kelsha one summer in his youth.

An Irish Masterpiece:
Barry is one of those modern writers whose prose can be so beautiful that one often stops when reading his books to roll a sentence or phrase around again in one's mind. To savour it a second time. Set in Wicklow in 1959, Annie Dunne explores the relationship between two Irish spinsters who together run a small farm. It uses this relationship to reflect the life of Annie both in terms of her own limitations and sadnesses, and against the changes Ireland has undergone in the previous, tumultuous 40 years. Barry describes an Ireland which is slowly disappearing now under the weight of its new-found European Union prosperity and, in his beautiful renditions of the rhythms and patterns of Irish speech, and in the various characters of this beautiful book, he has created a masterpiece.

Annie Dunne:
This is one of the most beautifully written books that I have read in a long time. If you are interested in the heart of the Irish people you will love this book. It has made me want to read everything this author has written. The lovely cover of the book with the little Irish girl is almost worth the price of the book itself.