First published 2008
Roseanne McNulty sits in her mental hospital room, documenting the story of her life as her hundredth birthday draws near. She has spent decades within these walls, but now the institution faces closure. The prospect of returning to the outside world after so many years forces Roseanne to confront her past and consider what remains of her future. Through her written memories, she reconstructs the events that brought her to this place and examines the choices that shaped her long life. As the hospital empties around her, Roseanne must decide whether she can find a place in a society that has moved on without her. Her story becomes both a reckoning with history and an exploration of what it means to reclaim agency after a lifetime of confinement.
Genres: historical-fiction, 20th-century, contemporary, adult-fiction, biographical-fiction, 21st-century
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: found-family, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Ireland
Period: 20th Century, 21st Century
481 pages · Hardcover · Thorndike Pr
Content warnings: mental-illness