Fox Swallow Scarecrow

by EilisNiDhuibhne (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  2007

  $3.27

  Twenty-first-century Dublin was chic, seductive, and affluent. At the glittering heart of the city is Anna Kelly Sweeney, a moderately successful writer, who lives in exclusive south Dublin with her wealthy property developer husband Alex and her son Rory. Thus insulated from harsh and unpleasant realities, Anna's life is spent in the endless round of launches, lunches and opening nights that makes up the city's literary scene. But Anna is not happy. Sensing the emptiness of her existence, she falls for the handsome but irresponsible Vincy and prepares to abandon home, husband and son for the dream of an all-conquering love. Anna's life is in crisis, and as events unfold, her sense of herself as both a woman and a writer is shattered. Self-consciously echoing and drawing on Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, Eilis Ni Dhuibhne's ambitious new novel uses the story of Anna as a critique of Irish society in the twenty-first century. Set largely in Dublin and Kerry, Ni Dhuibhne weaves Anna's story together with that of Leo, Kate, Gerry and a cast of other characters, to create a rich tapestry, a web of stories through which to explore, amongst other things, family and marriage, the materialism of Irish society and culture, the relationship between the urban and the rural, the role of the writer and of writing, and the search for purpose, meaning and spirituality in modern Irish life. Panoramic, strikingly original and compulsively readable, Anna Kelly Sweeney is a modern-day morality tale, an intelligent, funny, critical but always fiercely humane insight into contemporary Irish culture and society.