You cannot bury the past. It always returns, demands to speak. Irish Examiner reporter Ann O'Loughlin has spent her career writing about justice. Here she fictionalises the forced adoptions of Ireland's unmarried mothers. Ella and Roberta O'Callaghan live alone in a crumbling Big House with their secrets, memories and mutual hatred. When they are threatened with bankruptcy, Ella opens a café in the old ballroom. The sisters are forced to confront their past when Debbie, a terminally ill young American woman, arrives searching for her birth mother. It's about a past where pregnancy was a well-kept secret, the baby only a shadow on the hospital wall as it was whisked away for adoption. Imprudent trysts, pregnancy, birth, rejection and anguish reverberate through the generations, but the novel is not without lots of human warmth and very intimate characterisation. Secrets emerge, there's a whopper of a twist and this unabashed tear-jerker ends with a well-earthed, well-calculated emotional finale.
