The Fisher Child: (TWO Bann River Trilogy)

Are you as open-minded, as trusting, as loyal as you think you are? Like the Renaissance painting which fascinates Kate, The Fisher Child is in three parts. In Part One, Kate is happily married to Dan, both of them second-generation Irish and comfortable in their middle-class north London lives. They have two children, a boy and a girl, with another one on the way. But when Meg is born, Dan cannot accept her as his child, and retreats to Ireland in bewilderment. In Wexford, his father and cousins are partaking in the commemoration of the 1798 Rebellion, and he learns about his ancestor Hugh Byrne, a rebel who was forced to flee Ireland. Dan will never know the true story of Hugh Byrne, which the reader discovers in Part Two, but beneath the shadow of the mountain where his family once lived, his dreams bring him deep into his genetic inheritance, forcing him to question the identity he has always taken for granted.

About the Author :
I was born in London in 1950 to Irish parents from Co Laois and Co Sligo. The north London of the 1950s was an enchanting, if in retrospect dangerous, playground for children, and I frequently escaped the confines of the family house to play in the bomb-sites in Highgate. This experience was the germ of my novel The Water Star. In 1956 the family settled in Ireland near Wexford town, but moved a few years later to Hollyfort in north Wexford. This picturesque landscape, featuring Croghan mountain and Annagh Hill, and the Bann River, features in the three novels which make up The Bann River Trilogy. Apart from three years in Barcelona in the mid-seventies, I've lived in Dublin since 1971, where I have been a full time poet and novelist since 1979. My next work, due in 2018, will be non-fiction, provisionally entitled 'Histories of The Irish.'

Review :
...this wise, tender novel. -Paul Magrs, TLS From its mesmerizing opening chapters in Florence, through the shocking climax to the close, the complicated inter-family relationships threaded with echoes of the past are woven with exquisite skill. A beautiful, evocative tale of love tested. -Sue Leonard, The Irish Examiner In its own quiet way this novel is unsettling and even shocking as it challenges the reader to step into Dan's shoes: are you as open-minded, as trusting, as loyal as you think you are? -Kirkus The novel's final image is startling, enigmatic, beautiful and challenging. Through it, Casey appears to urge a re-examination of that which we assume to be philosophically ordered, and to confront our own dreams just as Dan does: which implies that nothing is separate and that the world has a wild interdependance that rises even from the genetic, cellular mine of our own bodies. A fresh and intriguing book that many writers would love to have written. - Mary O'Donnell, Amazon Casey, one of the quiet men of Irish writing, is a careful, diligent storyteller, and, as he has shown here, daring. [his]... attempts to describe the emergence of modern Irish society, its myths, its realities and bitter truths, through his Bann River Trilogy, remains brave and honest. -Eileen Battersby, The Irish Times