Longlisted for the 2014 Man Booker Prize

We are our stories. We tell them to stay alive or keep alive those who only live now in the telling. That's how it seems to me, being alive for a little while, the teller and the told.

So says Ruthie Swain. The bedridden daughter of a dead poet, home from college after a collapse (Something Amiss, the doctors say), she is trying to find her father through stories--and through generations of family history in County Clare (the Swains have the written stories, from salmon-fishing journals to poems, and the maternal MacCarrolls have the oral) and through her own writing (with its Superabundance of Style). Ruthie turns also to the books her father left behind, his library transposed to her bedroom and stacked on the floor, which she pledges to work her way through while she's still living.

In her attic room, with the rain rushing down the windows, Ruthie writes Ireland, with its weather, its rivers, its lilts, and its lows. The stories she uncovers and recounts bring back to life multiple generations buried in this soil--and they might just bring her back into the world again, too.

• We started tracking this book on July 25, 2014.
• This book was $9.17 when we started tracking it.
• The price of this book has changed 53 times in the past 3,778 days.
• The current price of this book is $3.99 last checked 2 hours ago.
• This lowest price this book has been offered at in the past year is $2.99.
• The lowest price to date was $1.99 last reached on June 14, 2021.
• This book has been $1.99 7 times since we started tracking it.
• The highest price to date was $13.10 last reached on February 1, 2024.
• This book has been $13.10 one time since we started tracking it.

• Literature & Fiction

• Text-to-Speech: Disabled
• Lending: Disabled
• Print Length: 369 Pages
• File Size: 836 KB