Publisher Description
Sometimes the past endures—and sometimes it never lets go.
This best-selling debut by an award-winning writer is both an eerie contemporary ghost story and a dread-inducing psychological thriller. Maggie is a successful young artist who has had bad luck with men. Her last put her in the hospital and, after she’s healed physically, left her needing to get out of London to heal mentally and find a place of quiet that will restore her creative spirit. On the rugged west coast of Ireland, perched on a wild cliff side, she spies the shell of a cottage that dates back to Great Famine and decides to buy it. When work on the house is done, she invites her dealer to come for the weekend to celebrate along with a couple of women friends, one of whom will become his wife. On the boozy last night, the other friend pulls out an Ouija board. What sinister thing they summon, once invited, will never go.
Ireland is a country haunted by its past. In Billy O'Callaghan's hands, its terrible beauty becomes a force of inescapable horror that reaches far back in time, before the Famine, before Christianity, to a pagan place where nature and superstition are bound in an endless knot.
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About Billy O'Callaghan
Billy O’Callaghan is the award-winning Irish author of four short story collections, most recently The Boatman, and three novels, including the internationally acclaimed My Coney Island Baby. Winner of the Irish Book Award and a finalist for the Royal Society of Literature's Encore Award and the COSTA Short Story Award among other honors, his work has been translated into many languages. His short stories have appeared in literary journals and magazines around the world, including Agni, Kenyon Review, London magazine, Los Angeles Review, Ploughshares, and the Saturday Evening Post. O’Callaghan was born in Douglas, a village on the edge of Cork City, where he still lives.