Sex and solicitors make the earth move in this tale of overheated emotions in the Irish countryside. Michael Bugler is a returned emigrant - from Australia, for a change - who, in trying to restore his family's neglected farm, incurs the wrath of his neighbour Joseph Brennan as surely as he inspires the devotion of Brennan's sister Breege. The title is taken from Emily Bronte - "fifteen wild Decembers/from those brown hills/have melted into spring" - and Wild Decembers has a distinctly Gothic feel, with its cast of voracious, highly-coloured characters - Joseph with his Greek myths and genealogies, the village gossip with his poetic erotica, Bugler with his red tractor and litany of lovers, the sisters Rita and Reena, whose sexual antics are oddly reminiscent of Kenny Everett's bearded ladies. Poor, innocent, dreamy Breege is but a shadow, an absence in their midst; but as with so much of O'Brien's work, the central character here is the land, mesmerising, implacable, unknowable.
