This is an ambitious and unforgettable story with all the warmth and emotional intensity of James Ryan¿s first novel, Home From England. Set in the rural Ireland that James Ryan portrays so evocatively, it is the story of five women, looking back to their girlhoods in the faraway world of the 30s, and coming slowly to terms in their own ways with the single traumatic event that forever changed their lives. As war threatened in Europe, life in rural Templeard went on as usual. In this golden childhood, the futures of a wealthy farmer¿s five daughters seemed as solid as the stones of their farmhouse home, as hopeful as the green fields that stretched to the edge of their world. Flossie, Nora, Margaret, Ber and the baby Girlie were as close as girls could be. Their life was the nearby convent boarding school and the long summers on their father¿s farm. Looking back to those moments before tragedy struck, facing the event itself - the rape, the child born in secret - Nora, the girl with the voice of a bird, is at last free. With his third novel, James Ryan returns to the land and the lives of the people wedded to it which made his first novel, Home From England, so resonant.