All That I Leave Behind

For Michelle, her love for her youngest child, Rosie, is not the result of maternal instinct. There's something else about it, something twisted and desperate, that will drive her away from her children, and from the life she has worked so hard to create in the Irish countryside. She never thought that when she met her soul mate, John-Joe, on a wet Dublin afternoon in 1968, that it would come to this, that her love for him would lead to an act of desperation that goes against every mother's instinct. Almost 30 years later, when Rosie returns to Ireland to get married, the O'Connor children are still marked by her leaving in so many ways. Mary-Pat, with her sharp tongue, who puts caring and duty before real love; lovely June, who thinks that money and status will fill the hole inside her; and her twin Pius, who has so much to give but who is barely living at all. For the children, the scars run deep, and when Daddy blurts out a bitter truth at Rosie's wedding, it feels as if the old wounds have been opened all over again. As the secrets each of them has kept come to the surface, they are forced to examine the lives they've been living and to confront painful truths about themselves and the choices they've made. And as new hope and new life blossoms, to understand that for things to be fixed, first, they have to be broken.

Alison Walsh has worked in publishing and literary journalism for a number of years. She wrote a popular and humorous column on family life for theIrish Independent for some years, and this was followed by a memoir on motherhood,In My Mother's Shoes. She is a regular contributor to the Sunday Independenton books and media and has contributed to the books programs on TV3 and RTE.