This Cold Country

New York Times Notable Book: “The lush but languishing Irish landscape of the 1940s is the perfect setting for this wartime love story . . . rich and satisfying.” —Library Journal

Only a few days after Daisy Creed precipitously marries Patrick Nugent, scion of an Anglo-Irish family, Patrick rejoins his regiment in France. Having never met her in-laws, Daisy sets sail for her new home, Dunmaine, County Waterford. The family’s affairs echo its estate: grand and forbidding on the outside, decaying and corrupt within. Patrick’s vain, spoiled sister, Corisande, soon flees to her lover, leaving Daisy alone with Patrick’s feeble brother, Mickey, and grandmother Maud, who has taken to her bed. In her determination to save Dunmaine and secure her place as its mistress, Daisy unwittingly becomes an accomplice in a dangerous political plot, as fraught as the rules of social class and the history of Ireland itself.

With grace and wit, the acclaimed author of The Dower House portrays a lost way of life and the war that rendered it obsolete, in “a tour de force . . . a deft, subtle, caring and honest novel that pursues and presents a vision of truths within a tiny tribal culture” (The Baltimore Sun).

“Draws on a range of comic traditions . . . [Daisy] has the kind of common sense and cleverness that are instantly ingratiating.” —The New York Times Book Review

“A talented writer . . . elegant prose and careful characterizations.” —Publishers Weekly