Book Overview

An Irish bestseller in hardback, The Boy in the Moon is the new novel from the author of Involved, set in London and contemporary and 1960s rural Ireland. What happens to a marriage when a husband is responsible for his son’s accidental death? Julia, whose young son Sam died in such circumstances, flees to the West of Ireland in a kind of madness to stay with her father-in-law Jeremiah, a dour, secretive old farmer, still living in a rundown farmhouse. Here, in his silent company, Julia stumbles upon the dark secrets of her husband’s family, and learns, to her greater understanding, how tragedy is passed on from generation to generation.

Setting and Style

Strong Irish setting – a superb evocation of rural life in the 1960s. One of the few female Irish novelists who doesn’t write like Maeve Binchy or Edna O’Brien. O’Riordan writes as powerfully as Dermot Bolger or Colm Toibin, but combines this with a wonderful ability to pin down character and the real mechanisms of human relationships.