Saoirse Aylward is raised by her mother and grandmother following her father's untimely death. By turns tender and stern, the Aylward women help Saoirse navigate an adolescence that is punctuated with strange turns of fortune and shocking acts of violence. Ryan's unsentimental portrayal of female relationships in a dreary Irish village keeps the novel's majestic flights of lyricism from becoming saccharine. Told in a series of vignettes that span more than twenty years in the life of a single family, this is a book that bristles with empathy and ambition, finding moments of grace in the mundane and positing love and storytelling as two answers to the riddle of human suffering. (BH)