by Lisa Carey
“Mermaids combines the flinty Ireland of Angela’s Ashes . . . and the long-delayed reunion of lost loves of Cold Mountain.”
—New York magazine
IN THE COUNTRY OF THE YOUNG
On a stormy November night in 1848, a ship carrying more than a hundred Irish emigrants ran aground twenty miles off the coast of Maine. Many were saved, but some were not—including a young girl who died crying out the name of her brother.
In the present day, the artist Oisin MacDara lives in self-imposed exile on Tiranogue, the small island where the shipwrecked Irish settled. The past is Oisin’s curse, as memories of the twin sister who died tragically when he was a boy haunt him still.
Then, on a quiet All Hallows’ Eve, a restless spirit is beckoned into his home by a candle flickering in the window: the ghost of the girl whose brief life ended on Tiranogue’s shore more than a century earlier. In Oisin’s house she seeks comfort and warmth, and a chance at the life that was denied her so long ago.
For a lonely man chained by painful memories, nothing will ever be the same again.
“A strange, wonder-filled book. . . . Every scene is gripping, every mood and movement . . . compellingly drawn, every new page an epiphany.”
—Washington Post Book World
“[A] haunting, beautifully rendered, exquisitely doomy novel . . . the story builds inexorably, carried along by its own brand of otherworldly eroticism.”
—Janet Maslin, New York Times
LOVE IN THE ASYLUM
Can love save those who believe they are beyond redemption? In and out of a swank northeastern mental hospital more than a dozen times in ten years, Alba Elliot, a twenty-five-year-old children’s book writer with bipolar disorder, believes she is a hopeless case. But an unlikely relationship with Oscar, a thirty-year-old drug addict whose “recreation” has cost him everything, and a century-old story hidden in the institution’s library bring about changes that Alba could never have imagined.
Brought together by fate, influenced by forces as beautiful and powerful as they are unforeseen, Alba and Oscar will slowly rise from the ashes of despair and self-destruction and, in the midst of righting an old wrong, begin to heal their battered spirits. A beautifully crafted, heartfelt tale of tragedy and triumph, Lisa Carey’s moving third novel is a testament to the surprising resilience of the human heart.
“Compassionate [and] ambitious . . . [Carey] acutely perceives how families, which are meant to be our safe harbors, can harbor instead the rocks on which our psyches are shipwrecked.”
—Boston Globe
EVERY VISIBLE THING
Five years ago the eldest Furey son, Hugh, ran off into the night and never returned. His parents, estranged by grief, are trying to put the tragedy behind them after a long, exhausting, and fruitless search. His mother, recovering from an emotional breakdown, has lost herself in a new career; Hugh’s father, having abandoned his faith and his position as a theology professor, now cares halfheartedly for their two remaining children. Left more or less to fend for themselves, ten-year-old Owen and fifteen-year-old Lena struggle to hold on to their brother’s memory—an increasingly self-destructive obsession that gives rise to angel fantasies, drug use, quixotic quests, and dangerous experimentation that will ultimately force a damaged family to confront its past and find a future.
“Prose that blossoms like a bruise, both aching and vivid . . . heartbreaking and, ultimately, redemptive.”
—Entertainment Weekly
“An emotionally compelling novel . . . bracing insight and sensitivity . . . A dramatic reminder of just what a corrosive mixture grief and silence can be.”
—Washington Post Book World
Also by Lisa Carey
The Mermaids Singing
In the Country of the Young
Love in the Asylum
Every Visible Thing
Copyright
The Stolen Child is a work of fiction. While the inspiration came from true stories of evacuations of Irish islands such as Inishark and the Blasket Islands, St. Brigid’s Island and its inhabitants are imagined and not intended to represent any real place or people. Any mistakes are mine, either out of ignorance or artistic license, and I apologize for them in advance.
P.S.™ is a trademark of HarperCollins Publishers.
the stolen child. Copyright © 2017 by Lisa Carey. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
Originally published in the United Kingdom in 2017 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
First Harper Perennial paperback published 2017.
first edition
Digital Edition FEBRUARY 2017 ISBN: 9780062492203
Print ISBN: 9780062492180
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