Showing results for "Sheehan" in Literary Fiction

Anna O’Shea has failed at marriage, shed her job at a law firm, and she’s trying to re-create herself when she and her recalcitrant nephew are summoned to the past in a manner that nearly destroys them. Her twenty-first-century skills pale as she struggles to find her nephew in nineteenth-century Ireland. For one of them, the past is brutally difficult, filled with hunger and struggle. For the other, the past is filled with privilege, status, and a reprieve from the crushing pain of present-day life. For both Anna and her nephew, the past offers them a chance at love.

Born in France, Sophie returns to her birthplace on a quest to find not the place where she was a child but her childhood itself. Her poor French and the mistake of a cab driver results in her stepping into the Hotel Placide, an ancient house of blue walls and blue curtains and blue rugs, in which she encounters an aspiring nun, a trigger-happy little boy, and a quiet, enigmatic farmer.

Set against the backdrop of America's Great Depression and Dust Bowl, a family of farmers from Oklahoma head west in search of work, only to discover thousands like them are also on the move. Following a violent altercation with some locals, they head back on the road with their dream of a promised land in tatters. And life is set to get much worse for the Joads....