The Hill Road - Patrick O'Keeffe

The Hill Road marks the debut of an original and exciting new voice in Irish Fiction. Writing in the tradition of William Trevor and John McGahern, Patrick O'Keeffe has created a vision of rural Ireland in four unforgettable novellas, linked by setting and circumstance, that is clear-eyed, evocative, humorous and true.

The townland of Kilkelly is at risk of being trapped for ever in an earlier version of itself, a time when shell-shocked soldiers returned from the trenches, and convent orphans could be billeted as servants with poor farmers; a time when a glamorous Irish American finds her liberated ways mean flirting is flirting with death, and a chance meeting on a train means the postman's widow must face the past she has always sidestepped.

Patrick O'Keeffe's Ireland is a precarious world where time and landscape are forceful characters, but it is also a place of natural beauty, of laughter, of family closeness, a place where stories can change lives.