A Keeper: The Sunday Times Bestseller

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Loneliness features in the lives of several of the characters but Elizabeth’s life is more positive at the end of the book. Urged on by a friend she answers a lonely hearts ad in the Farmers’ Journal and meets Edward Foley, a taciturn farmer who lives in an isolated cottage with his domineering mother.

Her mother passed away and it is now up to Elizabeth to sort through her things and close up the house. Whilst I expected Elizabeth’s discovery of her origins to be revelatory and of momentous importance to her the fairly muted, and abrupt ending, proved a bit of a damp squib.

I'm not completely certain that I didn't miss something there, but I don't really feel like I can be bothered going back to re-read and find out). The book goes back and forward in time telling the story from both Elizabeth in present day and her mother Patricia in the past. Meanwhile her 17 year old son back in NYC makes long lasting decisions that impact both his and Elizabeth's lives.

Born in Clondalkin, a suburb of Dublin, Norton's first big TV appearance was as Father Noel Furlong on Channel 4's Father Ted in the early 1990s.His first novel I loved so when I seen he had this new novel coming out, I just had to get myself a copy. That box, and an appointment with her mother’s solicitor, unravels everything Elizabeth believes to be true about herself and her family.

Patricia is a bit lonely and when her friend pushes her to put an ad in a farmer's magazine she ends up starting correspondence with a man named Edward Foley. Following her mother’s death home in Ireland, Elizabeth travels to Buncarragh where she has inherited her childhood home. Her mother has been dead for five months, and Patricia still finds herself setting the table for two. Graham Norton’s follow-up to his hugely impressive debut novel, Holding, is a bleak family drama set across a parallel narrative forty years apart.

I had a couple of “eye roll” moments with this book, and I noticed several detail oversights, but this was an excellent read for me.