Fiction/The Stone House by Marita Conlon-McKenna: Marita Conlon-McKenna has a wonderfully engaging way of telling a story. She proved this years ago, of course - and to the most demanding of readerships - when she exploded into the world of children's literature with her Famine novel Under the Hawthorn Tree, writes Rose Doyle.
The Stone House, her fourth novel for adults, is contemporary, pertinent and, as always with Conlon-McKenna, populated by a cast of characters who span the generations. The title is an inspired one, given the way stone and houses can be ungiving and secretive as well as sheltering. In Conlon-McKenna's story, layers of the unspoken and wilful in a family come full circle until at last, for some at least, there is the sanctuary of new beginnings.
But enough of endings. Marita McConlon-McKenna doesn't waste time getting down to her story, introducing place, time and people with an involving immediacy. The main players are women, three daughters and their mother, with a pater familias less present but entirely pivotal.
Frank Dillon's belief that "the only geography you need to know is your own country" doesn't stop his daughters Romy and Moya straddling the globe in search of life. Nor does his conservatism stop a third daughter, Kate, choosing to live as a single mother.
Typically, too, his value system doesn't in any way interfere when he finds love outside marriage or when he bends planning and other laws to the greater good of business and gain.
But the real stories within the story of The Stone House are in the chapters detailing the lives of the sisters and their mother, Maeve. Money, sex, love, greed, secrets and death all have their time and place. Not unlike life, really.
Marita Conlon-McKenna's stage is contemporary as the issues her characters face; there's even an eve-of-marriage Temple Bar pub crawl. She's done her homework, knows how young women live and think and brings it all together to build a story of everyday lives that become less everyday with every page.
The dilemma of women who stay in a marriage for the sake of children, a home and stability, loneliness within marriage, the ache of sexual jealousy, the open secrets that humiliate in a rural community - these things, and more, fill the pages of The Stone House with incident and detail and make for a great read.
Rose Doyle's novel, Shadows Will Fall, will be published next month by Hodder and Stoughton.
The Stone House by Marita Conlon-McKenna Bantam Press, £10.99