‘Martin Toppy is the
son of a famous Traveller and the father of my unborn child. He’s
seventeen, I'm thirty-three. I was his teacher.’
Melody Shee is alone and in trouble. Her husband doesn't take her news too well. She doesn't want to tell her father yet because he’s a good man and this could break him. She’s trying to stay in the moment, but the future is looming – larger by the day – while the past won’t let her go. What she did to Breedie Flynn all those years ago still haunts her.
It’s a good thing that she meets Mary Crothery when she does. Mary is a young Traveller woman, and she knows more about Melody than she lets on. She might just save Melody’s life.
Melody Shee is alone and in trouble. Her husband doesn't take her news too well. She doesn't want to tell her father yet because he’s a good man and this could break him. She’s trying to stay in the moment, but the future is looming – larger by the day – while the past won’t let her go. What she did to Breedie Flynn all those years ago still haunts her.
It’s a good thing that she meets Mary Crothery when she does. Mary is a young Traveller woman, and she knows more about Melody than she lets on. She might just save Melody’s life.
After several pages, I began comparing the note on the cover, "A joy to read" - The Independant, and what I was reading : an obviously complicated woman, confused bordering on harpy, hard on her husband, not nice with her father and has been awful to her ex-best friend who ended up killing herself. Everything was black, Melody was not nice but also deeply depressed and thought a lot about death. I thought The Independant and I definitely don't have the same notion of joy and found it hard to keep reading about Melody.
Then... Then I understood why, for the most recent part, she was hard on her husband and couldn't agree more with her ! And from that point, I got more and more hooked by the story, the depth of the characters, Breedie, Pat, Melody's confusion, her pain, her anger, the losses she had to cope with and her inability to find out how to live with herself.
The time setting is unusual : each part of the book is related to the progression of her pregnancy. The characters in this novel are complicated, some are really wonderful (Mary Crothery is "a card") and gradually, Melody finds out how to deal with everything that happened in her life, how to atone for her sins, how to deal with herself, how to completely change the life of some people around her and hers at the same time.
My review will never do enough justice to this book. When I first wondered what to write about it, my only thought is that it was like a light in the sky, like the sun shining after the rain while everything is wet all around.
I then went to search for videos of Donal Ryan talking about All we shall know and listening to him speak, I was struck by his empathy, his hope for human kind, his capacity of understanding human weaknesses and I thought I really had to catch up on this wonderful writer.
Beautifully written, this novel is devastating and uplifting at the same time. The end is totally unexpected but gives so much hope for Mary and Melody. You'll still think about it long after you have finished it. As the author says at the end : "I want the experience of reading my books to be intense, and memorable, and to count for something in the lives of my readers beyond a temporary distraction." He succeeded.
Then... Then I understood why, for the most recent part, she was hard on her husband and couldn't agree more with her ! And from that point, I got more and more hooked by the story, the depth of the characters, Breedie, Pat, Melody's confusion, her pain, her anger, the losses she had to cope with and her inability to find out how to live with herself.
The time setting is unusual : each part of the book is related to the progression of her pregnancy. The characters in this novel are complicated, some are really wonderful (Mary Crothery is "a card") and gradually, Melody finds out how to deal with everything that happened in her life, how to atone for her sins, how to deal with herself, how to completely change the life of some people around her and hers at the same time.
My review will never do enough justice to this book. When I first wondered what to write about it, my only thought is that it was like a light in the sky, like the sun shining after the rain while everything is wet all around.
I then went to search for videos of Donal Ryan talking about All we shall know and listening to him speak, I was struck by his empathy, his hope for human kind, his capacity of understanding human weaknesses and I thought I really had to catch up on this wonderful writer.
Beautifully written, this novel is devastating and uplifting at the same time. The end is totally unexpected but gives so much hope for Mary and Melody. You'll still think about it long after you have finished it. As the author says at the end : "I want the experience of reading my books to be intense, and memorable, and to count for something in the lives of my readers beyond a temporary distraction." He succeeded.
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