Regina McBride

Having spent her life peacefully collecting kelp with her mother and dreaming of the legendary Holy Isles, Maeve O'Tullagh is horrified when her mother and new sister fall into a mysterious trance.

The Fire Opal

"My mother was never easy in the world of houses. She was a tinker, a traveler girl who had married a wealthy man. Her name was Agatha Sheehy....There are silences all around my mother's story." So begins The Nature of Water and Air, set on a patch of Irish coast where, amid a flurry of whispers, we meet Agatha's only surviving daughter, Clodagh. Determined to secure her mother's elusive love and the truth about her, Clodagh is swept into a relationship with a handsome, isolated man. He brings her to the heart of her mother's story, where she must confront the questions "Does a truth change love?" and "What madness will come from chasing a secret?" Powerfully sensitive, this startling debut novel about forbidden love will place Regina McBride among our most celebrated novelists.

The Nature of Water and Air

"In a haunting coming-of-age memoir, the author begins seeing the ghosts of her parents after they committed suicide within a few months of each other and, terrorized by these visitations and flattened by grief, must learn to separate madness from imagination and sorrow from devastation to find her way back to herself, her home and her remaining family,"--NoveList.

a memoir

Ghost songs

An exquisitely lush and lyrical story about marriage and motherhood, attachment and letting go, set in early twentieth century Dublin. Hailed by critics for "connecting what's felt on the skin with what stirs the soul" (Elle) and for prose that The New York Times calls "shimmering," Regina McBride writes with exceptional passion and courage. Now, she has crafted her most heartbreakingly beautiful novel yet. "...To my husband's mother, I was an unassuming girl, a kind of empty vessel like the Virgin Mary who would carry holiness in her womb." So begins The Marriage Bed, the story of Deirdre O'Breen, who comes from the Great Blasket Island, a windswept place off the Irish coast. It is there that something stunning happens to Deirdre's parents, shamefully driving her to the mainland. The crossing takes her to the civilized world -- and toward Manus, the son of a wealthy and devout family. An architect, he is stirred not by God but by imagination: Dublin is struggling to find its way into the twentieth century, and Manus wants to fashion its landscape. Like the city itself, the couple's marriage is fraught with hope and complicated by legacy. At the heart of this striking novel is Deirdre's family secret. Resurfacing when her daughters reach adolescence, she must confront the questions, "How much of our parents do we carry? Do their sins and frailties shape who we become to our own children?" How Deirdre veers from her husband to embrace these answers makes for a sensuous, page-turning read. The Marriage Bed is a profound work: an inquiry into the extremes of erotic love and a testament to the power of longing and the hold of unresolved grief.

Regina McBride

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