My Dream of You

Oddly enough, it's history--her own, and Ireland's--that brings Kathleen back to life. Shattered by a close friend's death, she leaves her job and London to immerse herself in a 150-year-old divorce case. In 1849, according to court documents, the Anglo-Irish landowner Richard Talbot divorced his wife because she committed adultery with their ragged Irish groom. Or did she? The book Kathleen imagines writing about the affair is a classic tale of passion--yet her research turns up a more complicated story, even as love once again makes inroads into her own life.

My Dream of You shares some of the same preoccupations as O'Faolain's bestselling memoir Are You Somebody?: a distant and loveless family life, the plight of Irish women. But it's the historical narrative that gives Kathleen's story both context and shape, juxtaposing the affair inside the demesne walls with the famine outside. The excerpts from her "Talbot Book" are searing in their intensity, studded with images of great beauty and unimaginable suffering. Some readers might in fact wish the book's balance tipped even further in the Talbot direction. Then, however, we might miss the author's heartbreakingly nuanced portrait of Kathleen's loneliness:

It was never real excitement that got you into bed; it was hope, like some stubborn underground weed. Look at the way you've believed every time, at the first brush of a hand across a breast, that the roof over your life was sliding back and a dazzling, starry firmament was just coming into view.

Kathleen de Burca is a travel writer based in London. The office is the nearest thing she has to a home. When a quick series of blows strips away the props of her life, she is faced with the frightening imperative of change.

In her crisis she decides to investigate a true story about a relationship so passionate that it burned its way across the barriers of class and culture -- a scandalous affair between the wife of an English landlord and an Irish servant during the devastation of Ireland's potato famine.

After an absence of thirty years, Kathleen returns to Ireland to research the story and begins a journey that leads her not only into the historical past, but into a reconsideration of the family she fled years ago. While back in Ireland, she meets a lover of her own who presents her with a choice that promises to alter the course of her life. As she moves toward her decision, she calls on the strengths of her identity as a woman, an Irish woman, and a woman who is no longer young. Meanwhile, she brings the story of the long-ago lovers to a denouement as tender as it is tragic.

My Dream of You explores the extremes of passion, the depths of loneliness, and the resilience of the human heart.