Eamon Redmond, a High Court judge in his sixties, is now nearing retirement. But where you would expect him to look back contentedly over a lifetime of achievement, Redmond is forced, unwillingly, into an examination of his past. Land and sea, past and present, country and city, youth and age: Toibin employs the juxtapositions of life with effortless power, conjuring an authentic and deeply moving story out of the shadows of a man's memory.

'The novel is narrated dispassionately and with deceptive simplicity, moving between the public figure of the judge in his study and the terrible deaths of childhood . . . It is impossible to read Toibin without being moved, touched and finally changed' Independent on Sunday