Mr Doyle keeps the garden of the pristine family bungalow in good shape and is on the board of the yacht club; Mrs Doyle keeps the peace and cooks sumptuous Sunday lunches; sons Anton and Syl are doing nicely in various unspecified businesses and if social-worker Noel is seen as a bit of a family failure, well, nobody talks about it much. But when daughter Eve wins a scholarship to an American university and discovers family therapy, disaster is almost bound to ensue; and it does, the crisis precipitated by the appearance in the drawingroom, on New Year's Day, of an illegitimate Doyle offspring.
The high point of this quirky little novel is the hilarious family conference presided over by two visiting American lesbian academics: at once ludicrous and insanely realistic, it begs to be made into a film as quickly as possible.
