Water, Carry Me
Orphaned as a child and sent to live with her hard-drinking, blarney-spouting grandfather, Una Moss manages to grow up sheltered from the violence all around her. She is vaguely aware of the hushed talk about politics and the cryptic comments her grandfather makes about her parents' accidental death. But, generally speaking, she's a normal kid – a bright student with a circle of mischievous girlfriends, and a healthy obsession with boys. When Una meets Aidan, she is swept off her feet. He is solid and dependable, a sexy and attentive lover, and he's in love with her. But Aidan, to Una's endless sorrow, is not whom she thinks he is. Water Carry Me is a spellbinding novel of love and betrayal, set against the backdrop of contemporary Ireland. With the strains of U2 in the background and the spectre of "The Troubles" looming large, Thomas Moran has created an unforgettable heroine and a heartbreaking story.
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Review:
Entrapment is a recurring theme in the art of Thomas Moran. His first novel, The Man in the Box, concerns a Jew hiding from Nazis in a secret, boxlike room in an Austrian farmer's barn. His next, The World I Made for Her, features a protagonist imprisoned within his own disease-ravaged body. In Water, Carry Me, Moran expands beyond physical constraints to explore the greatest trap of all: love. When we first meet Una Moss, she is in her final year of medical school in Ireland. Orphaned at the age of 8, she has grown up uneasily straddling two worlds: that of her working-class grandfather, Rawney, with whom she lives in a village outside of Cork, and the upper-class milieu of private school and moneyed friends. Early in the novel Moran hints at the political themes that will soon enmesh her: Rawney, a railroad engineer, frequently carries mysterious crates "all the way to Sligo, up near the Ulster border," and boasts of his "dangerous friends." In reality, though, his friends are more endangered than dangerous: Mungo, the fisherman who occasionally brings strange packages ashore in his boat, is the victim of a mysterious shipwreck; Des and Mick, who help load the contraband, are both picked up by the police, only to reappear weeks later with "a hole in their lives, an awful, secret space, a haunting."
About the Author:
Indeed everyone in Moran's novel is haunted in some way by the conflict in Northern Ireland. Una herself was orphaned because of her father's involvement with one side or the other:
The violence is like a virus moving invisibly through our blood, the IRA and the Ulster Defense Association the Typhoid Marys of it. It kills some, and deadens the hearts of the rest of us. Nobody but idiots--and the mad fanatics--are immune.Neither, it turns out, is Una. Though at first she manages to lead a fairly normal life--going to school, spending time with her friends, and even falling in love with charming Aidan Ferrel--eventually the Troubles engulf her, too, and it is love that proves to be her undoing. In the haunting, heartbreaking Water, Carry Me Moran weaves the political and the personal into a net so subtle that his characters don't know they've been caught in it until it's too late. --Alix Wilber
Thomas Moran was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for a ten-part series he wrote on Mafia control of New York’s garment industry. He is the author of The Man in the Box, which won Book of the Month Club’s First Fiction Award, and The World I Made For Her, which has been optioned as a feature film. He divides his time between Woodstock, NY, and Europe with his wife and son. Moran's novels have been translated into five languages.
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- PublisherBrilliance Audio
- Publication date2001
- ISBN 10 1587882795
- ISBN 13 9781587882791
- BindingAudio Cassette
- Rating
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