From the author of This Happy and winner of the Sunday Times Short Story Audible Award, comes a deeply moving, funny, profound novel about Cormac, a man approaching forty and still single, and the women that prop up his life. A novel for readers of Anne Enright, Tessa Hadley, Sally Rooney and Jonathan Franzen.
I have taken apart every panel of this, like an ornamental fan. But we stayed in the cottage for three weeks only, just three weeks, because it was cut short you see - cut short after just three weeks, when I'd left my entire life behind.When Alannah was twenty-three, she met a man who was older than her - a married man - and fell in love. Things happened suddenly. They met in April, in the first bit of mild weather; and in August, they went to stay in rural Ireland, overseen by the cottage's landlady. Six years later, when Alannah is newly married to another man, she sees the landlady from afar. Memories of those days spent in bliss, then torture, return to her. And the realisation that she has been waiting - all this time - to be rediscovered.