ennifer Johnston escapes the curse of a lifetime literary achievement award to produce a tiny novel which glimmers like an island in warm Irish rain. You sense, rather than see, its colours. Everything we love is here: the rhythm of her prose, the clarity of her perception, her wry humour, the familiar themes: the grand old house, the childhood view, the ability of the past to rise up and confound; and arching over all, the old certainty of the Anglo-Irish. Summoned by the death of her bullying father, Annie returns to her childhood home in Dublin. At first she is determined to sell up and go back to her life in London. Then, as she comes to understand what happened in her childhood – what kind of people her parents were, how her mother died, who loved whom – Annie is reclaime