Fool's Sanctuary
A Novel
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
Jennifer Johnston's powerful novel of 1920s Ireland and one woman, on her deathbed, looking back on the tragic day that changed the course of her life
In northwest Ireland, eighteen-year-old Miranda Martin lives in a country estate home with her father. A recent widower, he spends his days consumed by a project to reforest their tranquil Donegal surroundings. Miranda, on the cusp of adulthood, spends her summer engrossed in a chaste but passionate courtship with a local boy named Cathal. Members of the Anglo-Irish class and the Protestant Ascendancy, Miranda and her father are sympathetic to the burgeoning movement for home rule. On the other side of the argument is Miranda's brother, Andrew, a soldier in the British military during the First World War. On leave from service, Andrew has come home with his friend and fellow soldier, Harry. Their fateful visit, recalled by Miranda years later, is marked by tensions over the family's disparate politics and culminates in a heartrending cataclysm foreshadowing what's to come for Ireland in the twentieth century.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Termon by the Irish sea is the great house in which Miranda and her detached father believe they and those they love will always be sheltered. The time is post-World War I, and for 18-year-old Miranda the idyll is shattered irreparably when her lover, Cathal, a working-class university student who is a member of the IRA, and her brother, Andrew, a cynical British Army officer, meet at Termon. The inevitable sacrifice of Cathal to save Andrew from an IRA set-up is foreshadowed in achingly terse dialogue. The violent act that leaves Miranda forever bereft is recalled in the opening scenes, when, on her deathbed, she remembers herself as a woman who has "known the embraces of no man.'' In elegant, evanescent prose Johnston (How Many Miles to Babylon and Shadows on Our Skin) enters the private agony of those destined to experience the stark romanticism and tragedy of the Irish.
