All That I Leave Behind

‘That was my punishment: to have left them – Mary-Pat, June, Pius and my little Rosie – and yet brought them with me in my heart, where I could never let them go.’ Nearly thirty years after their mother’s disappearance, the O’Connor children still bear the scars of her leaving. Mary-Pat pushes her own family further and further away. June quietly lives her own lie. Pius has shut himself off from the world, while Rosie has spent the past ten years denying who she is. When Rosie returns to the small town where they grew up to get married, she awakens old ghosts. As the siblings are forced to confront the reason their mother left all those years ago, they begin to realise that for things to be fixed, first they have to be broken. And for their mother, time has not erased the pain of leaving them. 'A powerful story ... Walsh shows an innate understanding of people's lives, and the emotional truths that underpin them' Kathleen MacMahon It hadn't been Rosie's idea - a 'quaint' wedding at her childhood home in the Irish countryside. Nevertheless she finds herself back in Monasterard after a decade away, with her American fiancé on her arm and a smile fixed to her face. As expected, the welcome from her siblings isn't exactly warm. Mary-Pat, the one who practically raised Rosie, is avoiding her. June is preoccupied with maintaining the illusion of her perfect family. And Pius, who still counts the years since their mother left, is hiding from the world. Each of them is struggling with the weight of things unsaid. In the end, it's their father who, on the day of Rosie's wedding, exposes what has remained hidden for so long. And as the O'Connor siblings piece together the secrets at the heart of their family, they begin to forgive the woman who abandoned them all those years ago.