Douglas Stewart

But John Ames in the novel is watching, is thinking about what will happen to his much younger wife and his son when he dies.

And there's another man in town who has an interest in his wife and

And it's a very conflicted feeling for the older pastor because he wants his wife to be happy, but he also can't bear the idea that she will have a life beyond him.

And in that central idea of possessiveness, I got a lot of riches for the idea of how a father feels like he can possess his son between my John and my Cal.

Well, beautifully is the first answer.

But also, I mean, maybe because I grew up around a single mother and all the women around me, you know, I'm a little bit of a...

Love to eavesdrop and I love to like here into worlds that aren't really mine as a young man and one of the many things I enjoy about this novel is the feeling that we're interloping or eavesdropping the letter isn't for us, you know, it's for his son and so we're kind of peering into this very Intimate world and also when you write a letter to someone I think you you can feel the bravery of the page you can say things that are sometimes difficult to say to someone's face and

And so for me, that's how she handles it.

I almost think the letter is the perfect form for a father communicating to his son as someone who's just written a book about a father and son who couldn't say even the most basic truth to one another.

So John should have written a letter.

Yeah, the novel is amongst women and I love it.

I adore it.

It's a fairly classic feeling story of children returning to an old rural family home, of going back to the old world in a way.

And it's quite a tense look at a family's life in rural Ireland in the 1960s.

The main character, Moran, is his name, and he's an old Republican whose life was changed by his days as a guerrilla leader in the Irish War of Independence.

And now in old age, he's a farmer and he's dying and his family returns to do their duty, to reckon with their past and be with their father.

For me, in this novel, there's the sense of a father controlling everything and the fealty he demands from his children.

But when the children return, they all have a very different approach to them.

The daughters are very obedient and do their duty, and the sons are a little bit more reluctant to give in to their father.

But there is so much left unsaid in this novel.