Kirjahaku

A letter, a lost love and a murdered child haunts the residents of Rockdale Street whose past is hidden.Orphaned and left on the steps of Nazareth house Alexander is adopted by the blue-eyed Elsie. But he is now nearly thirty, skint, jobless and in love with his best friend's wife. He tries to turn his life around, but at what cost? The three-foot statue of the Virgin Mary seems to cast judgement, but Alexander is not the only character with shadows...Set at the foot of The Black Mountain the past comes back to haunt them all, for 'the heart', they realise, 'is as dark as the mind'.

The shifting reality of time, friendship and love is difficult for Maloney to grasp. Life keeps knocking him down, but he keeps on getting up. He believes in resurrection, in the human spirit divine. At times he talks a load of Maloney Baloney, he admits it too, but he also understands that he and Molloy 'were lovers of the world, and of all who sail in it'. The story opens on a bridge.

'And so, ' his grandfather said, continuing the story as he gently squeezed Jake's hand, 'the land retains the soul of those who have died, of the soldier and the commoner too...and so the dead grow though they are dead, and so the dead live though they are no longer alive.' The importance of the past, of memory itself, haunts the imagination and lives of the characters in these stories. They remember those they have known and lost, and whom, in strange encounters, they meet again and again.