A Keeper
by Graham Norton
Hachette Australia

The host of the much-loved Graham Norton Show also writes a column for the Telegraph newspaper. He has written a couple of non-fiction books and his first novel Holding was a bestseller. His new novel takes to reader to the wild windy countryside of Cork where he was raised, crediting his mother for giving him the seeds of the story.

Elizabeth Keane arrives in Buncarragh on a wet afternoon from New York. She has been away for 20 years but after only five minutes “all the feelings that had made her flee the place had come flooding back”. She had been ‘poor Liz Keane, growing up without a father’ but her mother has died, and she is back to sell her mother’s house before returning to New York.

Leaving her son with her ex-husband who lives on the other side of America, she doesn’t expect her visit to last very long, but things never turn out to be that simple – in Ireland as well as in America. Finding a small pile of ribbon-bound letters at the back of her mother’s wardrobe, she sets out to find out more about the father her mother never spoke of.

Going back to Muirinish where she was born, she finds Castle House which was built in front of the ruins of an old castle near the sea in Cork. This was where her father had lived, but it was a huge mystery as to why her mother had fled, taking her baby and retained her maiden name. Elizabeth has to track down the keepers of the past to uncover secrets and scandals that they have kept locked away… and find out that familial history has a perverse way of repeating itself.

The story is totally absorbing as the narrative switches from ‘then’ to ‘now’, allowing the reader to be slightly quicker at putting the pieces of the puzzle together than the hapless characters in the intriguing tale. Seeped in genuine warmth for the characters, this story has an extra reward for the reader by revealing the meaning of the title in the closing pages.

Lezly Herbert

 After some new books? Head to the Book Depository