Aroon has had a very sheltered upbringing but she never seems to feel the need to spread her wings, experience more of life, so it is hard to place all the blame of her ignorance on her upbringing. I am not even gonna mention that the prose itself great, which makes it quite a page turner as well. She ends by referencing males in general: ‘He sticks that thing of his … into the hole she pees out of … It’s a thing men do, it’s all they want to do, and you won’t like it. It is narrated in retrospect by Aroon, the ‘unloveable’ daughter who has, in effect, been orphaned by her parents’ ‘impervious intimacy’ with each other.

Satiric about a bygone time, when sex was not discussed, when behaving well was all, when harm wasn't acknowledged, but not at all soft or nostalgic. Another Anglo-Irish family whose members are dedicated to mutual assured destruction, even as they slide into genteel poverty. Seeing her own name on that makeshift coffin, Molly knew how near she had come to sharing that fate.Her mother is particularly venomous: “Fat people are not supposed to feel the cold,” she tells Aroon as an explanation for reducing the number of active fireplaces in the house.

G. Farrell, who had won the Booker in 1973 with The Siege of Krishnapur, but it’s easy to see why Farrell’s surreal and witty portrait of postwar Anglo-Ireland in Troubles (1970) would have looked like literary kin, and Keane may well have enjoyed being promoted to the head of this arch Irish lineage. Two years earlier Mamie Cadden, a midwife and backstreet abortionist, had been sentenced to a year’s hard labour for abandoning and exposing a baby on the roadside in County Meath. Phipps notes that her mother, then in her early twenties, had been having an affair with a married master of hounds. A superb comic creation, Mrs Brock is a middle-class widow, given to playing the piano, knitting, and falling in love with her employers.If she hadn't been nominated for the Booker prize in 1981, this novel would have escaped my attention, and that of many other readers, I suspect. But eight years later Bobbie died suddenly, after surgery for a perforated ulcer, leaving her with two small children and a house she couldn’t afford.

I definitely seem to have different tastes to the rest of my book club (although that said, most of them didn't like any of the characters in this, either, so maybe we were in sync this time).This absurdly preventable tragedy left Keane with two daughters to raise alone in a society where grief was considered the worst behavior of all.