When a large, untidy black woman shows up at the front door of her Dublin house, the elderly Alice naturally assumes it is the black baby she, as a young girl, paid the nuns half-a-crown to adopt from the mission in Africa. Naturally? Nothing is natural, yet everything is acceptable, as the reader happily pelts along this helter-skelter of a story in which Irish assumptions about life and love are challenged from both inside and out. To give away any more of the plot would be a crime - suffice it to say the laughs are frequent, but keep a tissue up your sleeve, just in case.
By Arminta Wallace