Romantic Ireland may be dead and gone, hut a good deal of it is preserved in Beatrice Coogan's mammoth novel. As far drama, there's hardly time to draw breath from the tempestuous, storm-tossed opening pages through famine and land war to marriage and - but only on the very last page - relative calm. The book was first published in 1969, and it's a pity that this edition didn't seize the opportunity to restore the anglicised Irish words to their original forms, and do away with the ugliness of, for instance, "avourneeen" and "a boucaleen".
