![]() She moves to his farm, where he lives with his widowed father and their farmhand, Gerald, but never feels that she truly belongs. ![]() When she finishes school, friendless and isolated, she meets James, a local farmer, and marries him to ward off the loneliness. It was her tragedy, and she was never so weak as to cry for the loss of her parents. ![]() She craved their pity and their sense of horror and at the same time she utterly despised the other little girls for allowing her to induce these feelings in them. Taken in by an aunt who does not want her, she’s sent to a convent boarding school, where she delights in telling others of her terrible loss to gain sympathy.Įvery time she told her story she felt as if she was leading the unsuspecting children to a vast black pit, and when she had taken them right to the edge, she would suddenly draw back and abandon them there. Set in rural Ireland, it focuses on Jane, who is orphaned as a toddler when her parents die in a house fire. It’s even hard to know what era this book is set in because there is a timeless quality to everything about it, and Madden’s adoption of a third-person omniscient narrator lends the entire novel the feel of a fairy tale or fable. It reads a bit like a thriller, helped by a few fast-paced early chapters, before settling into an intriguing if downbeat story where nothing is fully spelt out - or resolved. ![]() Fiction – paperback Faber & Faber 164 pages 2014.ĭeirdre Madden’s The Birds of the Innocent Wood, first published in 1988, is a mysterious, opaque tale about dark family secrets and strained relationships spanning two generations. ![]()
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