While Michael and Annie Keane taste the intoxicating and bitter fruits of the sexual revolution, their older brother finds himself on the way to Vietnam. Clare, the youngest, seeks to maintain a saintly innocence. As their parents struggle to uphold the family's framework, the siblings experience the challenges and liberties of the 1960s.
Billy fell in love with a beautiful Irish girl working for a wealthy Park Avenue family. Billy wanted to marry Eva, but then she went back to Ireland. Eva died of pneumonia. Billy never got over it. Billy began courting Maeve not long after, but for the rest of their lives, he, she and Dennis shared a hidden, twisted grief.
Twice a week, Lucy Dailey leaves suburbia with her three children in tow, returning to the Brooklyn home where she grew up, and where her stepmother and unmarried sisters still live. And all the while, the children watch, absorbing the legacy of their haunted family.
On the cusp of fifteen, pretty Theresa is the town's sought-after babysitter - adored by children, but also a solitary soul with an already complex understanding of human nature. During this summer, it is her cousin Daisy, a frail little creature with glittery shoes and worrying bruises that don't heal, in whom Theresa invests her greatest love.
Presents a portrait of a working-class American family living through the tumultuous middle decades of the twentieth century. This novel captures the joy, sorrow, anger and love that underpin, and undermine, what it is to be a family.
Explores the mysterious depths of what seems like everyday life with unforgettable insight and resonant emotional power. This story is narrated by a woman who had in her care, that summer, four dogs, three cats, the Moran kids, Daisy, her eight-year-old cousin, and Flora, the toddler child of a local artist.
Explores the mysterious depths of what seems like everyday life with unforgettable insight and emotional power. On the cusp of fifteen, pretty Theresa is the town's most sought-after babysitter - cheerful, beloved, adored by children and animals, but also a solitary soul with an already complex understanding of human nature.
Charming Billy is an award-winning novel set in the New York Irish community. It tells of the love of a man for a woman who dies, of how his cousin breaks the news to him and of how he never gets over it to his dying day.