From the author of Damage, a new novel of piercing emotional intensity and intelligence - about loss and love and what it takes for the heart and mind to bear them both.

The dramatic death of a teenage boy in a small Irish town in the early 1960s sets the story in motion, and three brilliantly realized voices - the boy's mother, his older sister, a German ex-pat neighbor - summon this world into existence. As they struggle to make sense of the tragedy, their descriptions of its aftermath mix with meditations and conversations about other love tested, twisted, or lost - including love of country - in the past and during the forty years through which the novel moves.

In the mother, we see how the desperate attention of her husband and the delicate bravery of her daughter lure her away from grief. In the neighbor, we see a man who knows all too well that 'after a tragedy, many survivors are lost.'� In the sister, we see someone intent on embracing the 'weapon of memory.'� These voices speak whole lives, shaped in essential ways by the boy's death, and by the ways the past requires as much attention - and love - as the present.