© Editions Joelle Losfeld, 2014
Born secretly at night, the woman’s daughter has spent her life hidden in an upstairs bedroom, gaining only a tenuous idea of the world beyond her window through the nightly stories of her mother, which delve slowly back through the curious nightmare of the woman’s life, from her daughter’s birth and the incestuous love of her brother, through the factories and ballrooms of the 1960s, back to a time when they first came to the suburb on the open back of a swaying lorry. Although the woman sees her own and her concealed daughter’s life in isolation, the novel begins to move backwards and forwards in time so that her story becomes part of the greater story around her. Back to the Victorian age and a young tutor obsessed with Bridget, a maid in the household where he works, who in turn is haunted by a chattering, childlike presence that makes her dread sleeping alone. And forward to Joanie, a modern street-wise girl consumed with nostalgia for a past she cannot have known. These lives are linked by a sense of place, and by the figure who watches over them, the old man whose cottage is now overshadowed by a motorway and who finally confronts the young boy who has discovered the bedroom where the woman’s daughter lived. The Woman’s Daughter is filled with characters who, in the words of the Sunday Tribune, are “the people who have been written out of history. Bolger’s work is an attempt to construct a history for them, an unofficial history, a preservation of the memory of wasted lives so that they may not, in the end, be in vain.".
Flamingo 2003
Translated into: French, Swedish & Serbian
Aisling Glynn
New Island Books
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Stillorgan
Co. Dublin
Ireland
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Website: www.newisland.ie