Edna O'Brien returns to the world of her debut novel, The Country Girls, in an inspired account of a dying mother and her daughter

From her hospital bed in Dublin, the elderly Dilly awaits the visit of her daughter, Eleanora, from London. The epochs of her life pass before her; emigrating to America in the 1920s, a romantic liaison she had there, the destiny that brought her back to Ireland, and her marriage into the stately Rusheen. She also retraces Eleanora's precipitate marriage to a foreigner, and Dilly's heart-rending letters sent over the years in a determination to reclaim her daughter.

Unfortunately, Eleanora's visit does not prove to be the glad reunion that it might have been . . .