Izzy Keaveney is in an unhappy marriage; her friend Colette Crowley ruefully observes, ‘So what if your husband’s a bit of a bully, they all are in their own way.’ It’s 1994 in a small coastal town in County Donegal and legal divorce is two years away. Despite offering such advice, writer Colette has escaped her own unhappy marriage through a scandalous affair in Dublin; an affair that was ultimately lacking.

Denied access to her children, she returns to the town in the hope that she may be able to see them again, renting the desolate cottage above the Mullens’ house. Rumours fly around the village; Colette’s grasp for freedom has failed. For the other women in the village, caught in their own loveless marriages, Collette’s actions have given them a glimpse of the forbidden, but her fall is deserved and to be expected. Having dared to be independent, she is now alone in the cottage, drinking too much, her life in tatters. ‘Independence? This is what independence looks like Izzy,’ she tells her friend. The village takes a smug satisfaction in Colette’s fall from grace.

This is a compelling portrait of people whose lives are intertwined through their tight-knit community, whose lives and circumstances don’t always bring out the best in them. As the local priest remarks, ‘People really have terrible, difficult, hard lives,’ but sometimes redemption is possible. This is Alan Murrin’s first novel and it is brilliant!