Confined by illness to a boat-shaped bed carved by her father, and surrounded by a library of books also amassed by him, 19-year-old Ruth Swain elects to become the chronicler of her County Clare community, though she can't help harking back to her own family history.

She's looking for her father amongst these thousands of books, reading through them all in the hope of finding clues about the real man behind the failed farmer who never sold any of his own poems but declaimed William Blake verses to his cows. In doing so, she seems to have overdosed on 19th-Century literature, adopting a voice that recalls her heroine, Emily Dickinson, and living in a consumptive-like languor that is also redolent of her favourite era. Longlisted for the Booker Prize, this is a celebration of storytelling in which Ruth jumbles up Irish myth, local folklore and family history and transforms them, via elegant, suitably quaint prose, into something personal and original.