Popular Fiction: 'Could one pupil, one child, be so unlucky, so stricken, before her fifteenth birthday?" asks a dismayed nun at the west of Ireland boarding school where Jude Feehan is about to receive some terrible news.
The teenager's mother died of cancer 10 years ago when she was just four years old and the nuns have been sent reeling on the arrival of the charming if clearly fraught Oliver, a thirtysomething writer charged with telling the teenager that her father, his best friend, has been killed in a freak sailing accident off the coast of Majorca.
The Catalpa Tree by Cork-based author Denyse Devlin is the first offering from Penguin Ireland in the popular fiction genre and the publishers haven't spared any expense judging by the bookstore windows groaning with promotional material for this story of loss and love and longing.
The book more than lives up to the hype. It is a gently gripping account of how Jude and Oliver cope with the tragedy that is never far from the surface of their lives. Apart from an uninterested and self-centred aunt, Jude is alone in the world and Oliver becomes the teenager's guardian, creating a complicated bond neither can escape.
The title of the book comes from the name of a tree with heart-shaped leaves that stands in the garden of a house Oliver rents in Landor, France. It's there, as well as Dublin and Connemara, that the story unfolds.
There is an unerring wisdom in Devlin's storytelling that marks her out as a writer to watch. Her treatment of grief and loss rings particularly true. "I don't know about getting over it," remarks Oliver at one point. "I only know that the hardest part about losing someone isn't that you can't survive without them, but that you can." In a less assured writer's hands this coming-of-age story might buckle under the weight of the heart- wrenching and taboo themes it explores. As it is, The Catalpa Tree engrosses until the very last line.
Róisín Ingle is a features writer with The Irish Times
The Catalpa Tree. By Denyse Devlin, Penguin Ireland, 451pp. €12.99