O'Brien's Irish hero recites biblical, Greek, and Irish history, mingling them until the world's story, as he sees it, is a tribute to immovable men such as Moses, who he swears settled Cloontha for the likes of him. Unmarried and devoted to the sister with whom he lives, Joseph is so blind with love for the life and land he and his forebears have earned--and with the will to preserve them against the barest change--that his own inability to give way is his undoing. Inevitably, his sister Breege and Bugler fall in love, but, in a landscape where everything is a contest of ownership and men measure their stature against a woman's fidelity, this love thrives exuberantly, though not lastingly, like "flowers that are hatched in the snows." In her 11th novel, O'Brien gives as good as Shakespeare: there's a little of Iago in the town fool, a deliciously nasty cripple named Crock, and a little of Ophelia in pretty Breege. The author means to break your heart, and her startling and redemptive prose leaves you as nostalgic as Joseph Brennan for what might have been, as eager for the next chapter as you are disquieted by its implications. --Amy Grace Loyd

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