Adult Book of the Month
Solace by Belinda McKeon
Published by Picador in 2011
Mark Casey has left his County Longford home for Trinity
where he is writing a PhD on the nineteenth-century novelist Maria Edgeworth,
who spent her life on her family’s estate, not far from the Casey
farm. To his father, Tom, who needs help baling the hay and ploughing
the fields, Mark’s studies aren’t work at all, and they are
set on a collision course, while Mark’s mother negotiates a fragile
peace.
In Dublin, Mark is struggling with his thesis, losing direction and about
to lose his funding too. Then, at a party he meets Joanne Lynch, a lawyer
in training. She happens to be the daughter of a man who once spectacularly
wronged Mark’s father, and whose betrayal Tom has remembered every
single day for twenty years.
Joanne too has escaped an overbearing father at home, and for a brief
time they conduct a love affair until the lightning strike of tragedy
changes everything. Thrown together by grief, Tom and Mark must learn
to adapt and accept each other as individuals, as well as for what each
generation represents.
‘Solace is about a lot of things - love, grief, parenthood, friendship,
the struggles for self-definition and intellectual autonomy - but at its
core is a theme that has animated many of this country’s most enduring
fictions: the endlessly problematic relationship between older and younger
generations’ Sunday Business Post
A sparely written book of huge emotional power...
Solace brings alive the rural experience and the conflicting values of
contemporary Ireland, but is also a richly compelling love story' Sunday
Independent
Belinda McKeon was born in Ireland and grew up on her parents' farm. She
studied literature at Trinity College, Dublin, and worked as an arts writer
for The Irish Times.
