The Blackwater Lightship

This is the most astonishing piece of writing, lyrical in its emotion and spare in its construction ...Toibin has crafted an unmissable read' Sunday Herald

In Blackwater in the early 1990s, three women Dora Devereux, her daughter Lily and her granddaughter Helen have come together after years of strife and reached an uneasy truce. Helen's adored brother Declan is dying.

Two friends join him and the women in a crumbling old house by the sea, where the six of them, from different generations and with different beliefs, must listen and come to terms with one another. It is in his emotional choreography that Toibin shows himself to be an exceptional writer. Helen is estranged from both her mother and grandmother ...