‘She had seen herself back there again walking through the woods and meadows and along the cliffs, painting the sea and the sky, and if not recovering the peace and joy of that other time, at least, perhaps, recovering.’

Following the break-up of her marriage, Irish-American artist Eve Oliver retreats to Derrymore in West Cork to find solace. She has happy memories of time spent in this village while her husband was researching a biography of nineteenth-century writer and artist Evelyn Hope-Rosse, a member of the family that still owns the Big House in Derrymore. But Eve is cold-shouldered by the current Hope-Rosses, who are angered by the claim in the biography that Evelyn was a lesbian.

Eve becomes fascinated by the figure of Evelyn, whose story is gradually revealed through her letters and diaries. Although the lives of these two women are separated by over a hundred years, Eve, through reading Evelyn’s diaries and learning why her husband suppressed them, gradually re-establishes her own identity as an artist and an independent woman.

In this striking debut novel, Jane Mullen gracefully weaves the stories of two women from different eras into a moving and absorbing drama.