Publisher's Synopsis
On an overgrown and rundown farm in Ireland in the late 1980s, widowed Minnie O'Brien (a shopkeeper's daughter in the village) remembers the past: courtship and marriage to craftsman-farmer Peter, the love of her life, whom she met at a country fair; their wedding and Dublin honeymoon in 1922; life on the farm; the births of three children; and what became of them. Brendan, the eldest son, goes off to be a missionary in Africa, surfacing later as a Catholic bishop in New York; Sheila, the only daughter, is a nurse at Guy's Hospital in London, then marries (unhappily) a rich Englishman; Frankie, the late arrival, seeks freedom in the Australian outback and loses touch - but Minnie waits confidently every day for his knock at the door.
Between the turf-cutting and roof-laying, ceilidhs and hurling matches of her early married days and the 'modern' age of mains electricity and 'aeroplanes' lie well-worn footpaths of reminiscence down which Minnie rambles contentedly as she waits for her men to come home. The first to turn up is troubled, boozy Brendan, the bishop. The last, too late, is Francis. Between them comes a visit from her dead husband's grandson - the son of an illegitimate child he fathered before he met her (and never told her about). Minnie effectively outsmarts Fate by going to her Maker sure as ever of Francis's return, faithful as ever to Peter and unconquered by Jude Fortune, her manorial neighbour, who (in a running subplot) has been trying to buy her land.
