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Title details for Tipperary by Frank Delaney - Available

Tipperary

by Frank Delaney
Frank Delaney
Audiobook
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Born into a respected Irish-Anglo family in 1860, Charles O’Brien loves his native land and its long-suffering but irrepressible people. As a healer, he travels the countryside dispensing traditional cures while soaking up stories and legends of bygone times.
At the age of forty, summoned to Paris to treat his dying countryman–the famous and infamous Oscar Wilde–Charles experiences the fateful moment of his life. In a chance encounter with a young Englishwoman, eighteen-year-old April Burke, he is instantly and passionately smitten–but callously rejected. Vowing to improve himself, Charles returns to Ireland, where he undertakes the preservation of the great and abandoned estate of Tipperary, in whose shadow he has lived his whole life–and which, he discovers, may belong to April and her father. As Charles pursues his obsession, he writes the “History” of his own life and country. While doing so, he meets the great figures of the day, and also falls victim to less well-known characters–who prove far more dangerous. TIPPERARY also features a second “historian”: a present-day commentator, a retired and obscure history teacher who suddenly discovers that he has much at stake in the telling of Charles’s story.
In this gloriously absorbing and utterly satisfying novel, a man’s passion for the woman he loves is twinned with his country’s emergence as a nation. TIPPERARY once again proves Frank Delaney’s unrivaled mastery at bringing Irish history to life.

  • Creators

  • Series

    A Novel of Ireland

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    November 6, 2007

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781415940112
      • File size: 483326 KB
      • Duration: 16:46:55

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      This fascinating novel tells the story of a young Irish doctor named Charles O'Brien and the chance encounters that befall him along his journeys. These include famous people such as Wilde, Yeats, Charles Stewart Parnell, and the founders of Sinn Fein. The story paints a vivid portrait of late-nineteenth-century Ireland and offers well-crafted characters who intermingle with real-life events. Frank Delaney's expert narration captures the spirit of his tale. With his rich Irish brogue and perfect literary aesthetics, Delaney offers an experienced yet intimate reading that expresses the pure melancholic ache that permeates history and literature. This true Irish experience will seize the listener's imagination from start to finish. L.B. (c) AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      July 9, 2007
      Seventy-five years after the death of Charles O’Brien, an Anglo-Irish itinerant healer and occasional journalist born in 1860, his memoir is discovered in a trunk. The result is this touching novel from Ireland
      author Delaney, in which the manuscript’s putative discoverer adds his own unreliable commentary to the fictive Charles’s probably embellished perceptions—making for a glowing composite of a volatile Ireland. Charles claims to treat Oscar Wilde on his deathbed; advise a young James Joyce (“When you write... be sure to make it complicated. It will retain people’s attention”); tell an appreciative Yeats the story of Finn MacCool; and inadvertently bring down Charles Stewart Parnell. He also meets the founders and leaders of Sinn Fein and the IRA, and will, as will Ireland itself, entwine his fate with theirs. And at 40, never-married Charles meets the love of his life, 18-year-old April Burke, an Englishwoman who repeatedly spurns him and exploits him, but who has a large role to play in his life. The narrator claims that his interest in Charles and April is academic, but he eventually confesses that he suspects their stories have some personal relationship to his own. Delaney’s confident storytelling and quirky characterizations enrich a fascinating and complex period of Irish history.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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