When Light Is Like Water

It is brilliant: her finest book yet Anne Enright
A triumph Joseph OConnor
Fresh and raw and completely entrancing Sara Baume
Powerful Edmund White

Alice, a young American on her travels, arrives in the West of Ireland with no plans and no strong attachments - except to her beloved mother, who raised her on her own. She falls in love with an Irishman, marries him, and settles down in a place whose codes she struggles to crack. And then, in the course of a single hot summer, she embarks on an affair that breaks her marriage and sets her life on a new course.

After years working in war zones around the world, and in the immediate aftermath of her mothers death, Alice finds herself back in Ireland and contemplating the forces that led her to put down roots and then tear them up again. What drew her to her husband, and what pulled her away? Was her husband strangely complicit in the affair? Was she always under surveillance by friends and neighbours who knew more than they let on?

When Light is Like Water is at once a gripping story of passion and ambivalence and a profound meditation on the things that matter most: the definition of love, the value of family and the meaning of home.

Adultery is often sentimentalised in fiction, but in her ferociously well written second novel Molly McCloskey gives it to us straight ... Each brilliant vignette offers a new angle on Alices ballooning sense of disorientation ... In spite of its lyrical title and exquisite prose, When Light Is Like Water is a brutal examination of sexual self-delusion. But it also has much thats memorable to say about love - not the affair kind, but the real thing... McCloskey writes with shattering insight on loss and the way that it can make us feel tender towards the worldGuardian

Powerful ... When Light Is Like Water is a tender depiction of love and loss that combines the personal pull of a memoir with the precision of a short story ... McCloskeys novel is packed with wisdom, and never heavy-handed with it. The details of the affair and the tawdry aspect of forbidden desire are brilliantly relatedSunday Times

Written with brilliant precision and insightSunday Business Post Books of the Year

McCloskey describes everything with a luminous exactitude ... Its entirely beguilingMail on Sunday

A thoughtful meditation on connection set against the backdrop of a world on the move ... Though McCloskey has no shortage of ideas, she also engages the heart: shes particularly good on the contrariness of our desires ... Fans of Anne Enright will find much to admire and enjoy.Daily Mail

LuminousIrish Times

McCloskey has the observational eye of the outsider, able to pinpoint the intricacies and mannerisms of the Irish people and landscape. ... But the writings the thing. Oh, the writing. McCloskey is the master of the metaphor, the doyenne of the deceptively simple sentence. ... Hers is a wondrous turn of phrase, and yet somehow it makes Alices life and interiority seem all the more realSunday Business Post

A delightful fish-out-of-water account stitched together with gentle yet wondrous prose Irish Independent Books of the Year

When Light is Like Water is as gripping as a memoir and as intimate as a poem. Molly McCloskey has written a novel that is both urgent and reflective, a tender and unsentimental exploration of loves dark corners. It is brilliant: her finest book yet. Anne Enright

Molly McCloskeys prose has such immense authority, precision and seriousness. This shimmering, beautiful,restle...