From amazon.co.uk:

Nearing her one-hundredth birthday, Roseanne McNulty faces an uncertain future, as the Roscommon Regional Mental hospital where she's spent the best part of her adult life prepares for closure. Over the weeks leading up to this upheaval, she talks often with her psychiatrist Dr Grene, and their relationship intensifies and complicates. Told through their respective journals, the story that emerges is at once shocking and deeply beautiful. Refracted through the haze of memory and retelling, Roseanne's story becomes an alternative, secret history of Ireland's changing character and the story of a life blighted by terrible mistreatment and ignorance, and yet marked still by love and passion and hope.

At the meetup at the OBCZ.

Picked up at the BCct meetup at the OBCZ at A Touch of Madness this afternoon.

Thanks, klaradyn; it looks like a special book. It's in prime condition as well.

Winner: Costa Book of the Year 2008.
Shortlist: Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2008.

Joseph O'Connor's review in The Guardian is summarised on the front cover of the book as follows: "A magnificent and heart-rending novel". Quite so.

Roseanne's story, as enigmatic as the book's cover, is told beautifully and with compassion. Heart-rending it certainly is, yet not without hope and grace. And it is just as much William Grene's (and many others') story, a story of the struggle and pain of Ireland, and the story of the effect of events and ignorance on people.

Some (unrelated) excerpts:

It is very difficult to be a hero without an audience, although, in a sense, we are each the hero of a peculiar, half-ruined film called our life. Now there is a remark that will not bear much scrutiny, I fear.

It is one of the graces of married life that for some magical reason we always look the same to each other. Even our friends never seem to grow old. What a boon that is, and never suspected by me when I was young. But I suppose, otherwise, what would we do? There has never been a person in an old people's home that hasn't looked around dubiously at the other inhabitants. *They* are the old ones, they are the club that no one wants to join. But we are never old to ourselves. That is because at close of day the ship we sail in is the soul, not the body.

My head is already stuffed with grief I suppose like a pomegranate with its red seeds. I can only bleed grief, having no room for more.

I do not know what I would say to myself if I came to myself for therapy. I mean, I no longer know.

When Horinkie read my review of the book her reaction was:
"you got me, this is terrible :-)"

So, it is obvious where the book should go next ...

... and it found me. Thank you very much, Stoepbrak!

What a wonderful read, sad and beautiful, a mesmerising story told in a lilting voice.

A few more excerpts:

The real comfort is that the history of the world contains so much grief that my small griefs are edged out, and are only cinders at the border of the fire. I am saying this again because I want it to be true.
Though one mind is a pitch of suffering seems also to fill the world. But this is an illusion.

But it was the friendliness in his voice that did it, the mere simple friendliness, a thing I hadn't heard for so long, and didn't even know I missed.

And a nice little detail from a CapeTonian point of view: The Irish have their very own Table Mountain - Ben Bulben.

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