Trespassers - by Aine Greaney (Paperback)

About the Book

From coastal Massachusetts to rural Ireland, the characters in Trespassers struggle to reconcile past and present, place and displacement, loss and hope.

Book Synopsis

A woman travels from her Massachusetts home to her native Irish village to care for her estranged and sick father. Back in her childhood home, she comes face-to-face with previously unspoken losses.A wealthy couple travels to Cape Cod to spend their 52nd summer on the wife's ancestral estate. On their private beach above Nantucket Sound, the husband must confront the realities of their long marriage and its social-class tensions. A widow agrees to sell her west-of-Ireland farm to move to an in-law apartment attached to her daughter--and the daughter's American family's--Dublin house. In her new urban home, Grandma must confront the family's abusive past and her adult daughter's refusal to forgive or forget. An Irish immigrant takes her American-born teen to a raucous Boston house party. At that party, the teenager discovers that her mother had lied about her child's birth father--a lie that will permanently divide the mother and daughter. As these 11 stories zig zag back and forth between coastal Massachusetts and rural Ireland, "Trespassers" brims with each character's attempt to reconcile past and present, place and displacement and loss and hope.

Review Quotes

Áine Greaney has her finger on the pulse of the transnational Irish experience and the challenges of contemporary feminism. Trespassers brilliantly engages themes of aging, gender, sexuality, and the family to depict an empowered but entrapped Irish diaspora in the throes of identity formation. Simultaneously rife with nostalgia for home and the fierce desire for success in the economically and socially brutal environs of Cape Cod and Boston, Greaney's collection is an exemplary illustration of the Irish immigrant presence in New England." -Ellen Scheible, author of Body Politics in Contemporary Irish Women's Fiction: The Literary Legacy of Mother Ireland

About the Author

Born and raised in rural Ireland, Áine Greaney now lives and writes in coastal Massachusetts. In addition to her published books, her short works have appeared in Creative Nonfiction, Another Chicago Magazine, The Boston Globe Magazine, The New York Times, Books Ireland, WBUR/NPR and other publications. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and cited in Best American Essays. She designs and leads creative and wellness writing workshops.