Spring 1915, Dublin. Katie Crilly gets the news she dreaded: her beloved twin brother, Liam, has been killed on the Western Front. A year later, when her home city of Dublin is suddenly engulfed in violence, Katie finds herself torn by conflicting emotions. Taking refuge in the home of a friend, she meets Hubie Wilson, a friend of Liam's from the Front. There unfolds a remarkable encounter between two young people, both wounded and both trying to imagine a new life.
Set partly in pre Celtic Tiger-Ireland, but mainly in Texas, and is narrated by Ray, a young wife and mother, on the eve of her family's return to their native Dublin as recession bites in America. In the opening pages her daughter, who does not want to leave the only home she knows, disappears and that is the prompt for Ray to tell her story, and the story of her family's life in suburban America over ten years, before returning to the fate of the disappeared child in its final section. Lean, gripping, emotionally sophisticated and very atmospheric.
Another Alice is the story of a poisoned childhood, a contamination that threatens to spread through generations. She is an ordinary woman, a photographer. She has arranged her life like one of her photographs: careful, ordered, stark. But under the surface, things are not nearly as smooth as Alice likes to think they are.