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Dancing on Ashes
a novel
by Anne V. McGravie

On sale: 11/1/2013
Formats: Paperback, PDF, Kindle, Epub
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After a breast cancer diagnosis in Chicago, Isabel finds herself back in Ireland, where she was born. Finally, she has the chance to clear up the mystery of her family's tragic death and her own lifelong pain. But how did she get to the island where she grew up? And is she really there? The only person she can talk to is Malachy, her childhood nemesis and the person she has blamed all her life for the death of her family. But what role is he playing now, and what role did he play then?

Dancing on Ashes is absorbing and surprising and it has more insight into human feelings and memories than you're likely to find in a dozen more ordinary books. Anne McGravie writes with poetic imagination, wry humor and emotional intensity. And she has the magificent love for and command of language that we expect from the Irish.


Anne V. McGravie

Anne McGravie is a highly respected, award-winning playwright.Her plays have been regularly produced in Chicago since the early 1980. She is of Scots-Irish descent, although she has lived in the United States for most of her adult life. “Wrens,” based on her experience in the Womens Royal Naval Service of Scotland in World War II, was extremely successful at the Fringe Festival in Edinburgh last year. Dancing on Ashes is her first novel.

 

 

Excerpt from Dancing on Ashes

An old pail, rusted, filled to overflowing with red-hot ash.

It was a ridiculous image sitting in Isabel Macauley's mind's eye, distracting her from what her oncologist was saying. Not that what Donald McGrath was saying required Isabel's full attention. Not that she was being critical of her doctor, who had taken such good care of her for the past two years. It was simply that God or fate had intervened in the progress of her cancer to call it a day. She was pragmatic, willing to accept that at eighty-six years of age she could hardly complain of a life cut short.

The image of the rusty, ash-filled pail was vying with Dr. McGrath's words for Isabel's attention "Always new research." "Must hang in there." "We're not giving up." . . .

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