From the Virago back cover:
"Oh, God, we own one another here! Body and soul - do we possess one another for ever, us Considines? What in hell's the matter with us, that we insist on owning things we know nothing about?"
Described by J.B. Priestly as a "peculiarly beautiful and arresting piece of fiction" this, Kate O'Brien's first novel, won the Hawthornden and James Tait Black prizes on publication in 1931. A stirring family saga, it opens in 1789 when Anthony Considine creeps into the town of Mellick with a stolen horse. By the 1850s, through thrift and hard work, his son Honest John has made the Considines a leading Mellick family. In turn his son, Anthony, builds a fine house in the country for his wife and children - most especially his adored son Dennis, little knowing that when Dennis grows up he will threaten the toil of generations with his love for a peasant girl. This is an enduring portrait of one family's strengths and weaknesses; of matches made and lost for respectability; of the constraints of Catholicism; of divided loyalties; and of individual freedom threatened by the pride of the Considine name.