My Dream Of You - Softcover

Nuala O'Faolain

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0718144864 ISBN 13: 9780718144869

Publisher: Riverhead Books, 2001

Synopsis

This compelling novel by Nuala O'Faolain intertwines the stories of two women, an Irish travel writer living in present-day London, and a British landowner's wife during the 19th century potato famine, who was convicted of committing adultery with an Irish groom.

"A lovely heartbreaker of a novel that asks the hard questions...O'Faolain writes beautifully about longing and regret." (USA Today)

"We often hail the virtuosic performance of a talented new 'writer's writer,' but O'Faolain may be a rarer thing in today's age of irony: a reader's writer, with a flair for straightforward, Dickensian storytelling." (Vogue)

"One of the finest achievements of the book is its unflinching, empathetic depiction of just how it feels...to experience the chill clutch of the thought that the rest of one's life might be empty of love, sex, intimate human contact...a fully rendered portrait." (The New York Times Book Review)

About this title

Review:

Nuala O'Faolain's My Dream of You takes the old feminist adage one step further: the personal is invariably political in this exquisite first novel, while its politics feel very personal indeed. The heroine, Kathleen de Burca, is an Irish travel writer living in London. Estranged from her homeland and her family, pushing 50 but still living in the same dingy basement flat that's been her home for two decades, Kathleen's is a life gone "even and dry." Love has been her traditional panacea: "I believed in passion the way other people believed in God: everything fell in place around it." But the only love that comes her way these days takes the form of grim, anonymous sex--and even that grows harder to find.

Oddly enough, it's history--her own, and Ireland's--that brings Kathleen back to life. Shattered by a close friend's death, she leaves her job and London to immerse herself in a 150-year-old divorce case. In 1849, according to court documents, the Anglo-Irish landowner Richard Talbot divorced his wife because she committed adultery with their ragged Irish groom. Or did she? The book Kathleen imagines writing about the affair is a classic tale of passion--yet her research turns up a more complicated story, even as love once again makes inroads into her own life.

My Dream of You shares some of the same preoccupations as O'Faolain's bestselling memoir Are You Somebody?: a distant and loveless family life, the plight of Irish women. But it's the historical narrative that gives Kathleen's story both context and shape, juxtaposing the affair inside the demesne walls with the famine outside. The excerpts from her "Talbot Book" are searing in their intensity, studded with images of great beauty and unimaginable suffering. Some readers might in fact wish the book's balance tipped even further in the Talbot direction. Then, however, we might miss the author's heartbreakingly nuanced portrait of Kathleen's loneliness:

It was never real excitement that got you into bed; it was hope, like some stubborn underground weed. Look at the way you've believed every time, at the first brush of a hand across a breast, that the roof over your life was sliding back and a dazzling, starry firmament was just coming into view.

The suffering of Irish peasants during the famine might be a grander subject than a solitary woman's search for passion. Yet one is as real as the other. In the Irish experience, as in Kathleen de Burca's, the movements of history leave ghostly tracks across individual lives. --Mary Park

About the Author:

Nuala O'Faolain is the author of the #1 New York Times bestselling memoir Are You Somebody? A columnist for the Irish Times, she as also worked as a producer for the BBC.

About this edition

• Publisher: Riverhead Books
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0718144864
• ISBN 13: 9780718144869
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1