This novel centres on a classic fictional set piece: a warring family at Christmas. It’s 2005, and the Madigan siblings, Hanna, Constance, Emmet and Dan, have travelled far from the County Clare of their childhood, but are still in thrall to their impossible, widowed mother, Rosaleen. Once reassembled round the festive table, she informs them that the bedraggled family home is to be sold, but, even more dreadful, she intends to live with one of them. It’s a promising comic set-up, but the road this novel takes to arrive there is a meandering one. The book opens on another meal, this time in 1980, just as Rosaleen is reeling at the news that her eldest son Dan intends to be a priest. “Hanna blamed the Pope. He came to Ireland just after Dan left for college.” Dan ha