How does one hold on to a world that no longer exists? Playwright and novelist Sebastian Barry explores this question in a poignant and exquisitely told story of innocence, loss, and reconciliation. Set in a rural section of Ireland known as Kelsha, "a distant place, over the mountains from everywhere," Annie Dunne tells the story of Annie and her cousin Sarah, aging unmarried women who live according to folkways that were already vanishing during the late 1950s when the novel takes place. Their great friendship is their most valuable possession, but Anniehunchbacked and bitter over the way the rest of her family has treated herlives in constant fear that it could be taken away. Quiet and intensely personal, Annie Dunne is both a story about and a meditation on the means by which we accommodate a world too big to understand. "Oh, what a mix of things the world is," Annie reflects, "what a flood of cream, turning and turning in the butter churn of things, but that never comes to butter."

One summer Annie's grandniece and grandnephew come to stay with her and Sarah. That same summer, a local handyman, Billy Kerr, begins to court Sarah and becomes more of a presence in the two women's lives. Through Annie's eyes we see the rhythms of their rural lifedrawing water from the well, slaughtering chickens, harnessing their one ponyas well as the ways the encroaching modern world, in the person of Billy, threatens to change it. We also see her guarded hope for a second chance, in the form of the children, to make peace with the new times. The old ways are revealed through Annie's thoughts of her grandfather, a stern, "unseeing" man whose memory Annie reveres. But her grandfather's work, as a policeman for the English, is a clue to Annie's alienation from her proud Irish neighbors. As the noveland Sarah's relationship with Billydevelops, this seemingly simple rural tale unfolds into a historical and romantic drama, with lonely Annie Dunne at the center of a fast-changing world. Annie's struggle to maintain the world just as it was highlights the book's broader theme of the collision between history and individual lives that plays out in even the remotest corners of the globe.

Annie Dunne is at once a love story of the deepest bonds between friends and a tragedy of a woman"one of the most memorable...in Irish fiction" (San Francisco Chronicle)whose uncommon kindness is unacknowledged by the people she cares about the most. With Annie Dunne, Sebastian Barry achieves the rare balance of winning the reader's sympathy for a character as bitter as the crab-apples she loves, prompting us to ask vital questions about the many disparities between how we see ourselves and how the world sees usand what those differences can reveal about the loves that sustain us all.