The Return of Maeve Carver

About this Story

Fifteen years after she left the west of Ireland for a London life of rented flats and theatre rigs, Maeve Carver is summoned home by a Tuesday phone call from her mother. Her father Eamon is dying, slowly, the way men with COPD do, in a hospice outside Galway. Her brother Sean, who stayed and ran the haulage yard and married a woman Maeve once disliked, has not been told she is coming. Over eleven February days in a house that has aged in her absence, Maeve is measured against the family she left and the one that kept going without her. There are no confessions, no reconciliations that tie anything shut. There is a mother at a stove, a dog she does not know, an argument in a kitchen, a father who says what he has been waiting to say on a good afternoon. Isla Hennessy's quiet, merciless novel of what the ones who leave owe the ones who stay.

Chapters

1. 1 The Phone Call On A Tuesday
2. 2 Driving West In February
3. 3 The House As It Is Now
4. 4 My Mother At The Stove
5. 5 My Brother Was Not Told
6. 6 The Hospice Rules
7. 7 A Letter I Did Not Send
8. 8 The Father In The Chair
9. 9 An Argument In The Kitchen
10. 10 The Night He Stopped Speaking
11. 11 What I Took Home

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