'Touching and nostalgic' GUARDIAN

'She conjures places as vividly as feelings, and feelings as exactly as her surroundings' VOGUE

'It is the only intimate and un-angry expression of the feelings of a colonised people that I have ever read' DAVID THOMSON

Polly Devlin grew up in County Tyrone, on the shores of Lough Neagh in the fifties, but it might as well have been another time and place altogether. In this memoir, she describes in witty, spontaneous and idiosyncratic prose her life as one of seven siblings in a Catholic family in Northern Ireland.

'A brooding, evocative study of Irish childhood, of the strong bonds of love and jealousy that sisters especially feel, the guilt-ridden pressures of religion, the magical countryside, the eccentric villagers. A hauntingly lovely work . . . beautifully written with poetic intensity which seems to encapsulate the Irish character with all its wit and bitterness and gift for words' HOMES AND GARDENS