Jean Sulivan, too little known in Ireland but respected in his homeland, was a French priest-novelist and essayist who died in 1980. This work is strictly non-fiction, however - an account of the last illness and death of his Breton peasant-mother, who was in her seventies at the time. An old-style countrywoman to the core, she had little comprehension of her son's literary career and could not understand why he was "always writing", yet in their own way they were close to one another. Her illness was at first diagnosed as "food poisoning followed by shock", but soon turned into a serious infection which killed her by inches. Moving and totally unsensational, the book is varied by some wry descriptions of the vie litteraire and by passages of introspective, sometimes sombre reflection. Eamon Maher's translation reads easily and with complete naturalness.