Annie Dunne

Product Information

I do love books where nothing seems to be happening and yet so much does (rather like with Jennifer Johnston who you kindly introduced me to) so if I can find this at the library I will have to give it a whirl. Eamonn Sweeney writing in The Guardian compared the book to the Samuel Beckett play Waiting for Godot saying "Waiting for Godot has been described as a play in which nothing happens, twice. When Annie’s nephew and his wife are set to go to London to find work, their two small children, a little boy and his older sister, are brought down to spend the summer with their grand-aunt. Much of what she thinks in the present is shaped by the past, and despite her sometimes cruel thoughts and her quick temper, this is a woman struggling to better herself despite her painful history.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. In the novel, Lillie remembers Annie as being often cross, rarely smiling and having a very sharp tongue. The eponymous protagonist is an unmarried woman in her sixties who lives with her similarly solitary cousin Sarah in a Wicklow farmhouse. Never far from Annie Dunne’s mind are memories and tales of Ireland during the high old days of respect, stability, wealth, and country estates—back before independence from England. Fortunately she is taken in by her spinster relative, Sarah Cullen, who is two years older and needs help in running a poor farm in Wicklow, Ireland, in 1959.Of course, I’m exagerrating to say that nothing happens, because of course lots of things happen, but they are small incidents in the scheme of things. On the other hand, the gorgeous writing enfolds the reader in comfort, so that we are not wholly repelled or dismayed but rather drawn in and possibly enchanted by this crabby old woman we have come to love. It is 1959 in Wicklow, Ireland,

It is the late 1950's, and Annie Dunne and Sarah Cullen are cousins in their 60's who work a small farm together in County Wicklow. The book is a short read at under 230 pages and is set in a small farmhouse in Co Wicklow in the late 1950s. Though one time when she's forced into a social situation with some of their classmates, she briefly fantasizes about what would happen if she revealed their connection: "How much terrifying and bewildering status would accrue to her in this one moment, how destabilising it would be, how destructive. Continuous pleasures, of character and language, in a book about life itself, with never a false note. A summer of adventure, pain, delight and ultimately epiphany unfolds for both the children and their elderly caretakers.I invariably end up going back to authors who simply know how to tell a good story without being too showy. But it's Annie's passionate observations and shifting moods -- rendered in dense prose that's close to poetry -- that fuel this fine novel. The Steward of Christendom, Sebastian Barry's magnificent play about the last days of the former Superintendent of the Dublin Metropolitan Police, was a big success when it premiered at the Royal Court in 1995.

But against that happiness moves the figure of Billy Kerr, with his ambiguous attentions to Sarah, threatening to drive Annie from her last niche of safety in the world. The relationship between Charlie Evans, a fed-up violinist-turned-ratcatcher, and Tinsel Greetz, his greasy anarchist pal, has a comic intensity reminiscent of the British film ''Withnail and I,'' and Tristan Egolf fortifies his story withÊmovie trivia. This is the story of an Irish woman, around 60 years old, never married (spinster as they would say in Ireland), with a hump in her back, who sees the Ireland of her childhood disappearing who feels isolated and is bitter because she has come to feel isolated and alone in the world, except for her cousin Sarah with whom she lives.Then there is the hidden but suspected molestation of the little girl about which Annie can do nothing, a frustration thing to the reader somehow who feels her helplessness and how if she said anything it would backfire on her. Their presence stirs Annie’s memories and sensibilities, and heightens her awareness of the vulnerability of her age. Read more about the condition New: A new, unread, unused book in perfect condition with no missing or damaged pages. Now all my mother’s things are dispersed also, and only this ladle has come from that time, passing through two or three sets of women’s hands. Set in 1959 on an Irish farm in County Wicklow, Annie Dunne is experiencing a period of calm and happiness.