Elizabeth Regan, after years of freedom - and loneliness - marries into the enclosed Irish village of her upbringing. The children are not her own, and her husband is straining against his job in the police force. Moving between tragedy and savage comedy, desperation and joy, this is a novel of haunting power.

Moran is an old Republican, a veteran of the Irish Civil War. His old age, its rhythm and shape, is dominated by his three daughters. It is they who revive the custom of celebrating Monaghan Day and it is through their lives that we discover the story of his life. The author also wrote "The Dark".

The stories in High Ground are set in ordinary places, in the streets and suburbs and dancehalls of Dublin, the small towns and fields of the midlands, the big houses of the beleaguered Anglo-Irish in the aftermath of their ascendancy, the whole changing country propelled in a generation from the nineteenth into the late twentieth century.

A family story, told with restraint and tenderness. This book is a son's unembarrassed tribute to his mother. His memory of walks with her through the narrow lanes to the country schools where she taught and his happiness as she named for him the wild flowers on the bank remained conscious and unconscious presences for the rest of his life.