Beskrivning
Beskrivning
We are our stories. We tell them to stay alive or keep alive thosewho only live now in the telling. In Faha, County Clare, everyone is along story…Bedbound in her attic room beneath thefalling rain, in the margin between this world and the next, Plain RuthSwain is in search of her father. To find him, enfolded in the mysteryof ancestors, Ruthie must first trace the jutting jaw lines, narrowfaces and gleamy skin of the Swains from the restless Reverend Swain,her great-grandfather, to grandfather Abraham, to her father, Virgil -via pole-vaulting, leaping salmon, poetry and the three thousand, ninehundred and fifty eight books piled high beneath the two skylights inher room, beneath the rain. The stories – of her golden twinbrother Aeney, their closeness even as he slips away; of their doggedpursuit of the Swains’ Impossible Standard and forever falling justshort; of the wild, rain-sodden history of fourteen acres of the worstfarming land in Ireland – pour forth in Ruthie’s still, small, strong,hopeful voice. A celebration of books, love and the healing power of theimagination, this is an exquisite, funny, moving novel in which everysentence sings.
